


red medicine for the pain; ATEEZ

by arrowthroughtheheart



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Angst and Feels, Angst and Humor, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Colonization, Era, Fluff and Angst, Historical Inaccuracy, Kinda, Loneliness, M/M, Mentioned Jung Wooyoung, Mentions of Violence, Self-Discovery, Self-Doubt, Some Plot, Spirit World, Strangers to Lovers, Timeline What Timeline, anywho, but in a good way, but thats a spoiler, but thats okay they have, historical fiction - Freeform, i wanted to make it a slow burn but it got so fast, i'm just here to provide to the sansang tag, just read it, movie-inspired fic, san and yeosang are inhuman, we're thirsty in here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 02:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30031596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arrowthroughtheheart/pseuds/arrowthroughtheheart
Summary: As a lonely spirit born from a peaceful and calm mountain, San barely knows why pain and agony exists. That is until he meets the human man named Kim Hongjoong who was a victim to society, which San knows nothing about - and his life begins from there.From then on he meets Yeosang, the so-called enigma. A mystery San feels intrigued enough to look into, but can he ever be around long enough to actually find out?
Relationships: Choi Jongho & Kim Hongjoong, Choi Jongho & Park Seonghwa, Choi San & Kim Hongjoong, Choi San/Kang Yeosang, Jeong Yunho/Song Mingi, Jung Wooyoung & Kang Yeosang, Kim Hongjoong/Park Seonghwa
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	red medicine for the pain; ATEEZ

**Author's Note:**

> there's two parts to this, but I've had several (more than necessary) mental breakdowns over this entire monster of a project. I only update around the times where ATEEZ comes back so herE'S THIS.   
> i will finish this. i will. manifest with me and pray for my quick recovery because goD I WANT TO GIVE THEM A GOOD ENDING LET MY BRAIN W O R K-

The boy has resided in one particular mountain for a while. 

His first memory of staggered attempts of walking, of the ray of sun pecking the peaks of his cheekbones, of the ground above him breaking in little particles as his dainty fingers caressed the swaying blades of grass--it has all been restored within the area. He never left, nor that he ever wanted to. 

It wasn’t like he needed anything either, not that he knows off. The boy is content with roaming the landscape he’s provided with all alone, with no confusion whatsoever of the world around him. The world is small, anyways, at least he presumes. The world is small when you care only for yourself, and to be perfectly honest with himself--the boy has never been, in any shape or form, needy. 

He’s fine with sleeping anywhere, underneath a moss-filled tree, above it, on top of its branches, curled sideways in on himself to feel small. He’s fine with zoning out anywhere, at any point in time of the day. It’s not like he’s got  _ other  _ things to do, like the voice in the back of his mind would constantly remind him. 

Confusion first started rising within his little careless heart as he steps into the new seasons. Probably his fourth change of season in this. . .mountain, this particular one that won’t change no matter how the seasons change. Like the boy himself. He hasn’t changed. Only with newfound confusion, as he’s pretty sure of himself this entire time. Not anymore.

It started because of a simple, worldly question.

_ Why is he here? _

Who placed him in such a place, and with what intention? The boy knows that he’s more than just. . . himself, as the ground whirrs and the plants gear up in motion whenever he passes by, as if he gives them the right to  _ be.  _ Maybe not that far, not that. . . important. Maybe they just fear him, for one reason or another. Fear him because of what, though? 

For his ability to listen? To understand the steady hum of the centuries-old mountain, to share the same amount of liberty as the cricketing bugs and chirping birds? To live alongside the chattering rabbits? Or to just be the center of everything that lives all around him? To feel, to hear, to touch, to listen.

Who gave him enough power to make the ground move on his simplest touch, and the plants to surge into life when he walks their way?

_ And are there more like him? _

Since he’s always felt empty. It’s almost nauseating how empty he feels, how alone. As if he’s a lost bear cub who woke up significantly later than the rest of his family after the month-long winter break where they all sleep in almost-death. As if the rest of his family had left him. Maybe that’s what it is. That’s why he’s placed there, alone, waiting. 

Should he wait until they come back? Do they even exist, at all?

Which drove him to something--no, somewhere--insane.

He knows he shouldn’t, technically, since his habitual routine blares red alarms telling him to return to the mountains he’s come out of, but it’s just so. . . inviting. Isn’t it? 

Those nicely forged pathways, made out of sand-coloured rocks. The boy has never seen these types of rocks, and somehow in the back of his head, the existence of those pathways are disturbing his peace. Which meant it was disturbing the mountain’s peace, too, if he puts two and two together. So it must be  _ his  _ responsibility to go check, wouldn’t it be? The trees couldn’t move. Neither can the rocks. And those helpless animals? No, never. All they can do is care about themselves. 

The boy assured himself--which was all he’s been doing since he’s made it out of the grainy dirts of  _ his  _ mountain.

‘Is it not normal to want to protect the nature you’ve resided in?’ he assures himself yet again before commencing. 

The atmosphere turned a few degrees colder as he stepped away from his little familiar field, and the boy stopped to listen and ponder. Why, he wonders, is the mountain so afraid of him leaving? Why is every single one of its habitants creaking and begging for him not to go? 

But as was pre-established, the boy hasn’t changed.

He wasn’t born into this world to second guess himself, so he didn’t. He was just concerned, slightly, for how his home will fare while he’s gone.  _ Home.  _ Nice, warm word. How did it just pop up in the back of his head, he wonders, grinning from ear to ear at how pleasant it made his heart feel. 

He left a little sprout at his familiar corner as a promise, an oath that he’d return soon. 

The boy climbs down the mountain, following the little pathway made by. . . who knows. Every single step he’d take sprouted a little patch of moss in his woke, though he paid little to no attention to them. He knows of his abilities, and though it looks new and exhilarating, since he’s never stepped on ground that  _ isn’t  _ covered in grass before this, the boy is more excited of something else.

What’s waiting for him at the end of this pathway? Would it lead him to the bottom of the mountain? What’s it like?

Probably as dirty as the bottom of his eagle friend’s claws, if he remembers correctly. The eagle is one of the only habitants who have gone places, quite literally speaking. Not only does he have a big enough mass to support himself on a long run--or long flight, per say--he’s one of the only habitants of this large mountain who is as alone as the boy. He’s got nothing tying him down, unlike the boy, no responsibilities, no family to return to--nothing. And he’s been here and there enough that whenever he comes back to the boy’s side, he’d look different. He smells different too, sometimes, but not in a bad way. Just, strange. Like other. . . unidentified creatures. 

Maybe the boy would be able to meet those unidentified creatures soon. At the end of this pathway, he’s hoping?

The boy stops dead on his track. 

_ What if they’re aggressive? _

He has never thought of fearing aggressive creatures, but that was only because; even the largest creature around the mountain he originates from fears him. Well, fear would be a stretch. His bear friends are very much non-aggressive, so they expect him to also not be an aggressive creature. So the boy has never felt this type of. . . doubt. It’s new, it’s foreign, and he was half-hoping to be vehemently pissed of the new discoveries he’s been coming to terms with, but he wasn’t. He was pleasantly thrilled. Enthralled, even, as he proceeds down the pathway with a renewed vigor. 

It appears to him that there’s a trail of smoke in the sky, its dark grey tone contrasting the sky’s naturally blue palettes almost painfully. The boy feels his lips twitch at this, and all of a sudden he’s standing in between his own emotional borders. One side of him dislikes how thick the smoke looks in contrast to how pretty and graceful the white clouds are, noticing how this smoke radiates from somewhere. . . further down. But another side of him picks up on this fact and shoots his adrenaline through the roof. He’s close enough to whatever it is to check up on it. 

The boy steps forward with cause now, eyes squinting when he comes face to face with a. . . thing. 

This thing is made out of wood, it seems. A lot of woods. A few dozen, at least. It looks almost like a natural-made wall, but instead of dirt and rocks, it’s made out of wood. There are no trees that grow this close to each other, the boy assumes, constantly trying to rake his brain. These woods are also held in a bound with each other by these string-looking, hard, things. They’re dark and rusty, but the boy can never be sure. He’s never looked that far underground before. Unless it’s not. . . made out of ground-based things. 

There’s a loud noise from beyond the wood-walls, and the boy jerks away from where he’s been standing to hide in a slightly shaded area. There’s a cylindrical thing by his side which his torso ran into as he jerked away, and it’s also made of wood, so the boy hid behind it. He’ll trust the things he’s familiar with. Something’s odd about these woods, however. They won’t respond to him. They feel. . . rigid. Dead? 

The boy hisses uncomfortably, shifting away from his hiding place. 

“Kim Hongjoong!” a voice hollers from beyond the wall, and the boy turns his attention to whatever he could see from all the way down there, where he’s seated angrily. The language feels familiar, but it’s not like the voice has said anything important yet. “Boy! What are you standing around by the gate for?”

“Sorry, Sir! I’ll get right to it!”

And the boy watches in awe how the wooden walls swing open, creaking as if they lack water. Do these creatures not water their trees? 

_ Unless they’re actually dead,  _ the boy thinks to himself, fuming again. 

The boy makes a slight misconception in his ‘hiding place’ however, forgetting that everything he touches with his bare, exposed skin would grow moss exponentially. Which means half of the wooden-wall he’s leaning on  _ and  _ that cylindrical thing made out of dead trees are, well, covered in fresh green moss. And this other creature who moved the wooden-wall previously, is a man named Kim Hongjoong. 

Hongjoong has trademarked tired eyes and shoulders, something the boy would grow to remember on this man’s features, but moreover, even if Hongjoong’s eyes are tired--he would never, in his life, be fooled over how a giant clump of moss grows overnight on half of his campsite’s walls. Especially accompanied with the fact that those overgrown plants are connected to the arms and hips of this. . . boy.

This boy who is looking back up at him, eyes wide and glowing, with horns coming out of the forefront of his head. The horns are also decorated with moss and other small, flowery plants, but the thing that astonishes Hongjoong the most is his paint-filled torso, or as the men like to call it, tattoos. They’re slightly glowing in the dim light of the boy’s hiding spot, but Hongjoong knows better than to be a fool in front of a deity. 

His grandma taught him better than this. 

Hongjoong’s grandma has always been a believer than otherworldly deities still live alongside humans in this modern age, and even if it sounds lunatic and almost crazy to other people, Hongjoong--who were born to be accepting and adventurous--believed in his grandma. He believed so much, he narrates in his own head, that he’s seeing one right now. 

The boy, on the other hand, is frozen in awe of how much this other creature looks like him. He looks. . . like him! 

Well, not as extravagant, and maybe this creature doesn’t spawn moss in his every step, but he looks exactly like what the boy knows himself to look like. Two arms, two legs, and a head. On the head, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Hair, too, but only on top of the head. They look the same!

“산 유령?”

_ “san yu-ryeong?”  _ (“mountain spirit/ghost?”)

He was talking, the boy thinks.

The boy has never talked. Never opened his mouth, even. But the name. . . does sound familiar. What was it that he called him? 

“San-”

_ Ah. _

His name, the boy thinks to himself. There was a distant blurred memory gnawing at the corners of his mind, hidden underneath mountains of dried leaves and mourning the death of summer. A memory he’s heard every time his eyes close for a split second only to be forced back open by the lack of need for them to sleep. Them, as in. . . spirits. And they have a name, much like himself. But that was his name. His name was San.

Who bestowed it upon him, San doesn’t really know. But he knows it’s his once this random creature speaks of it--so it must’ve resonated with him in life for quite a while. He’s simply forgotten about it, this entire time. Maybe. 

The boy- well, San, looks over at the man in front of him, proceeding to stand up from where he was hunched over. He hopes that these creatures communicate the same way the rest of his mountain habitants do; by  _ touching.  _ So as he reaches over to Kim Hongjoong, trying to relay the message that he has to go now by touching the man’s forearm, he’s shocked when Hongjoong flinches away.

San’s eyebrows downturned, looking down at Hongjoong’s terrified facial expression. It made San flinch away, too. What did he do?

“I- I’m-” Hongjoong stutters, and San notices how the man is looking at his horns. 

An urge sparked deep within him, and San leaned forward again with his right hand, but now to touch himself, a few centimetres below where he feels the centre of himself is located. A heart, per say. With his palm splayed on top of his left chest, San starts speaking a language he didn’t realize he possessed the knowledge to.

“Terrifying, is it?” - he asks in reference to himself.

Kim Hongjoong proceeds to shake his head frantically, denying the question. “No- no sir! You’re not! In fact. . . you’re kind of. . . nice-looking,” he trails off, trying desperately to claw on some words from his frontal lobe. Something that sounds more majestic than. . . ‘nice’.

He finds nothing.

“Why, then?” San askes again, giving his right hand out, palms opened as an invitation. Hongjoong took some time to think of what the question means, and then he was sent into a wave of nostalgia, trying to remember his grandmother. It was welcomed, however, since the memory calmed him down a little bit. Yes, he’s speaking to a glowing, tall-looking deity with plants all over his body and could possibly be an omnipotent god, but the thought of his grandmother, when she was alive, excitedly explaining how in reality; all of these humanoid deities are soft at heart just- does something to Hongjoong’s nerves. He relaxed majorly, all of a sudden, and the alarms blaring in his head once before vanished. 

He’ll trust this  _ san yu-ryeong,  _ mostly because his grandmother did, too.

“Oh, I’m- I’m sorry,” Hongjoong took a few steps backwards to give the deity a formal bow. “My grandmother taught me a long time ago that you can’t touch deities with your own hands, and I’m just living off what she taught me.”

San took the information in, the gears in his head not working completely yet. For some reason. He feels the need to shake Kim Hongjoong’s hand. Or lay his palm on his forehead. Something, anything. Communication, San thinks to himself, is important. He’s never met a creature which will downright refuse his requests, not before this. They do ignore him, from time to time, like the animals. But to refuse?

“Even when they ask to touch?” San tries again, and Hongjoong looks up from the ground, still in his bowing position. “You can’t?”

That was a morally gray question for Hongjoong, both literally and figuratively. He never thought of spirits to be this. . . forthcoming, to say the least. San’s hand is still outstretched, now in a close enough position to help Hongjoong get back on his feet. “Handshake,” San says, smiling from ear to ear--though he himself is confused with how much he’s able to communicate with this new and advanced creature.

And Hongjoong felt a pull as he looked into San’s glowing green eyes, as if the sun’s rays themselves sashayed through a pure, untouched emerald. So he did. He shook the deities’ hand.

Only to wake up in his bed, warmly coated under his blankets accompanied with the smell of warm cocoa radiating from his bedside table. The roof above him looks like the headquarters, but there’s no way they’re back at the barracks. They were out camping, looking for- huh?

“You’re literally so fucking lucky,” the familiar voice of his friend buzzed out every doubt Hongjoong has in his mind. He  _ is  _ back at the barracks. But- how- why?

Hongjoong mutters a short, ‘What do you mean?’ to his friend, Park Seonghwa, but he probably just sounded like he’s slurring his words. 

“No recollection whatsoever, huh. Lucky bastard. The rest of the unit you went to look for horses with are gone.  _ Missing.  _ The commander thinks it’s some sort of landslide, but no one knows how you and a few younger comrades live, either. All we know is the survivors showed up half dead in front of the barracks one day, covered in dirt and placed side-by-side like canned tuna. Based on how dirty you are, the commander thought that most of you would have some inner-head trauma, buried underneath the landslide, but shockingly,” Seonghwa slams a wet fabric into his bucket. “There was nothing wrong with  _ any  _ of you.”

Hongjoong felt the suspicious glance radiating off of his bunkmate, and he shrugs altogether to avoid further mishap. It’s not like he thinks Seonghwa, out of all people, would voice his suspicions to the higher-ups, but still. Hongjoong doesn’t feel like starting anything that day. He felt. . . distracted. As if his brain is actively trying to piece together information that he forgets. Or he was forced to forget.

“Maybe I was brainwashed by a mountain god,” he shrugs, and Seonghwa threw the wet fabric his way. Somehow, Hongjoong feels like the joke isn’t entirely a joke, on his part.

_ ((Fun fact 1: The word  _ 산 유령  _ directly translates to mountain ghost, but since San isn’t any soul from a predecessors’ human life, he’s a spirit that comes from a few collective energies from inanimate objects! In his case, particularly: the mountain.)) _

San was ecstatic, to say the least, when Kim Hongjoong accepted his handshake. The man’s skin felt much like his own; soft, tender-looking. It buzzes and hums under his thumb much like the plants would, but with the consistency of an animal’s life-force. It’s new, yet it brings him a scent of familiarity. Where has he felt this before, he wonders.

Though after not even a split second after, San had to catch the man’s limp body using both of his arms. Kim Hongjoong is no longer conscious, and as if it couldn’t get any worse from there - the contact San has with this man gave him a whiplash of memories. The man passed out and San was  _ attacked  _ by an onslaught of episodes.

Not his, however. 

Hongjoong’s. 

Here are some things he managed to pile out, despite the fact that the memory plays way too fast to San’s liking.

Just like Hongjoong, who looks almost exactly like San--there are others out there, and they live around Hongjoong. Like a habitat. They don’t look exactly like Kim Hongjoong, as San would expect, but the base of their figures are shaped the same way. Some of them do look like the man in front of him, however, and those ones he refers to with a filial tune. If San would have to describe how the tune sounds to him, he’d choose the purr of a content mountain cat as it approaches its den with most of its kittens waiting inside. 

He doesn’t get to hear a lot of those from Hongjoong’s memories, unfortunately. Most of the time, the young man is ridden in knots. He’s stressed, he’s scared, and he’s worn out, yet he needs to try his best all the time. San has yet to figure out how so. 

There’s a prominent character in the back of Kim Hongjoong’s memories, just like there’s a constant noise in the back of San’s head that is now slightly numbed, ever since the man reminded him of his name. The character he sees from Hongjoong’s memories reminds him of. . . familiarity. Not his own, however, since he’s never seen something of this caliber. Someone, he meant.

It must be that grandmother the man mentioned.

“Friends,” San tests out the word as they slip through his lips. His voice still feels weird to use, and however much he tries--which isn’t that much, since he just began talking a few moments ago--he can’t get rid of an even weirder feeling; referring to himself with a name. Still, it felt weird talking, and he decided to not continue testing out the newly discovered vocabularies, however hard it is for him to ignore. 

Maybe he needs to. . . go.

Right, that was in his plans before this. 

San reached over to pick Hongjoong up and put him in a more comfortable position, something he learns from his animal friends whenever they take care of their younglings. However, just as soon as he reaches over to lift Hongjoong up by his shoulders, something  _ stings  _ the palms of his hands--both which he used to touch the human man. San shifts away, both his palms tucked underneath his chin in sudden shock, mixed with a few small percentages of worry. And fear. The looming question returns, previously gone since he was so in awe over the human’s appearance.

The sting didn’t only hurt his skin. It hurts  _ everywhere.  _

It’s almost as if he’s raging, and there’s a heat much worse than the sun scorching through the forest’s leaves in summer, while he lies on the ground like a naked mole rat. It’s way worse, and it feels. . . buried. As if someone’s trying to bury an eternal fire in the pits of his epigastrium. Why would anyone choose to bury something so, so wild? 

What was that? Raging?

San looks around, squinting. He felt as if he lost sight for a second. That was new. Rage was new. Pain was also new. Much less shock, and fear. 

Is this why he was born in a mountain, so far away from civilization? Is this what humans do to each other? Is this real, this memory?

He’s never seen anything like it.

Why, he thinks to himself while still on his knees, would humans do that to themselves? Because of the rage he felt? And that, something like that, would be an excuse for. . . what did they call it- war?

Was that what the pain was for him? 

San lets his eyes roam over Hongjoong’s hands, noticing how the pad of his fingers were wilted, mostly. He didn’t recognize it as something abnormal previously, since he wasn’t aware that not every human has wilts on their palm. He was hit, and not only once. Repeatedly. There are even marks of other healing scars around the man’s hand. 

Why would it be?

Was he a bad person? San doesn’t think so, at least based on his very biased judgement. He acknowledges his bias, however, since he’s only ever talked to Hongjoong while he looks. . . well, like a mountain spirit. At least, judging from how Hongjoong went straight to saluting him on his knees. Was it fear? Do humans beat each other up to establish fear? That sounds more like it. More natural, like the orders of other animals San has observed. 

So humans  _ are  _ animals?

San shifts back to Hongjoong’s side, pulling the fabrics around the young man’s shoulders so he shouldn’t have to come in skin-to-skin contact with him anymore than necessary. If those are the types of memories this man has, San is better off without the chance of ever seeing it. What can he do, anyways? He has his home to take care of, an order to fix. If the pathway was established as a way to get to his home, what will he do if some  _ other  _ more aggressive humans come by to ruin it? What will San do if he’s not there when it happens?

What will happen  _ to  _ him, when the situation gets to that point?

Hongjoong looks quite comfortable in that corner, sleeping on a patch of small-sized moss San managed to grow while drowning in his own thoughts. Whoever asked him to do something outside will come looking for him, right? He won’t freeze to death, out here?

San exhales at this point, seemingly annoyed that he needs to think  _ this  _ much about someone he accidentally meets. He struts forward to knock on the wooden ‘gates’--if he remembers correctly, from getting the Hongjoong-memory transfer a few minutes ago. San squinted a little bit when he left little sprouts of plants growing on the surface of this very much dead wooden gate, but a few snorts and grumpy gruffs later, someone appeared from behind the gate. 

The guards saw no one important in particular, but they found an unconscious Kim Hongjoong, basically tied in some sort of moss-made cocoon while half of his body is leaning on a barrel. A few confusions and half-hearted searches later, the guards of the humans’ campsite decided that it was just a weird little mishap which occurred from how drunk they were the night before.

San retreated to his mountain, still pissed that he didn’t get to confront humans on how thick and damaging their smoke is to its natural surroundings. He figured out a little bit later that he should’ve marked something of his own in Hongjoong’s memories for future references, but decided that the kind boy would be better off living in ignorance.

He still thinks so, even after a few days later.

San is seated on a cliff’s edge, a wounded wolf by his side. The mountain spirit hasn’t been peaceful in a while, yet he never wants to think about why that would come to be. If he decided that the man he met a few days ago would live better in ignorance, then he would, too. He’s just a mountain spirit. Nothing special about him. It’s not like he can go and stop wars--aside from the fact that it’s none of his business. 

So there he was, trying to mend the wound of an adult wolf with little medicinal herbs he’s been growing around them. Since last night was met with heavy rain, today, the sky wanted something a little different. Which resulted in a soft rain, coming and going however much the wind wants to let it stay. There are chirps of a few lonely birds from one side of the forest below him, which San ignored, since he saw a large herd of other birds coming to its aid. It won’t be alone anymore, soon enough. The spirit wonders when the time will come for him to no longer be lonely. Maybe one day.

His eagle friend is seated beside him, too, looking out into the horizon as if  _ he  _ owns the place. 

“Your Highness,” the wolf refers to San, sounding as if she’s a mumbling lazy bundle of exhaustion, “would this heal fast enough?”

“If you do not force yourself,” San picks a leaf out of a bush he sprouted out moments ago, giving the wolf a side glance, “then maybe.”

“If you’d just stay out of trouble,” the eagle tuts in, “you’d heal even faster.”

“I was just trying to protect our humble abode, Your Highness,” the wolf interjects in self-defense. “Understandable,  _ Moro,”  _ San huffs, turning his eyes out to look over the setting sun. “But that’s mostly my job.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to do it alone, Your Highness.”

She has a great point, which is what he needs to start admitting. It’s not hard for him to do everything by himself. He’s alone--lonely--, he’s bestowed with enough power to both heal and destroy, he can understand everything around him only with a simple touch - San doesn’t  _ really  _ need help. But sometimes it irks him that he can’t help  _ everyone. _

He’d argue that he doesn’t have enough mental capacity to achieve that much fruition in thinking of others’ problems, but he knows himself well enough that he knows that argument is wrong. He knows there are a  _ lot  _ of things he doesn’t know, not because he doesn’t know them, but because he simply. . . forgets. 

It’s terrifying to think about, and when he wants to not think--he starts busying himself. 

Unfortunately, he has no time for either of those today.

“Sir!” the eagle squawks, and San had only a split second of reaction time before it dawned upon him. The bad feeling he’s been burying? 

It has only grown stronger and stronger.

“At the foot of the mountain, Sir,” someone chimed in, but San was too blindsighted to listen, “they’re heading here!”

He knows  _ that  _ much.

What the mountain spirit doesn’t know at that point, is how fast the situation turns downhill for them from then on.

San helps Moro to her feet, watching absentmindedly while her cubs walk by her side to help her walk steadily off the high grounds. His eagle friend is still there, though further up his shoulder than he was before. San can definitely see the smoke trails, hardcore evidence of how the men in Kim Hongjoong’s campsite travels here and there. They would bring these things called ‘torches’, which was considered some sort of light source for their naked eyes, a fire burning on a piece of wooden stick that was previously covered in some kind of oil. They were near, and somehow the revelation turned every bone in San’s body alert. He doesn’t even know if he  _ has  _ any bones.

“Should we do anything, Sir?” was finally a question that set San’s brain into action.  _ “Washi,”  _ he refers to the eagle on his shoulder, “we should run.” 

Washi looks  _ troubled.  _

“Run, Sir?” he questions. “That’s not. . . like you.”

“Well,” San lifts him up, signalling for the eagle to get in motion,  _ “I  _ won't.”

It appears to the eagle as perfect sense, which should offend San even a little bit, maybe. But he just sees it as the fact that his inhabitants believe in him--though blindly, which is kind of, problematic in a sense--and that’s all that matters at the moment. Well. At the moment.

These men were following the pathways.

Which means, in a couple minutes, they’d get to the end of this pathway--since San ruined the rest, some of which they built a few years before San was born into existence, at least in this reality--and meet him face to face. They’d probably think he’s some sort of rebel, since the other option is dying right in front of him since he’s too scary for them to comprehend--whichever it turns out, it’d be good for San, since he only has  _ one  _ solution to people barging into his humble abode.  _ Earthquake.  _

Huh. Hold on a second.

If he shows how he  _ himself  _ made the earthquake occur to shake off a few intruders, wouldn’t the survivors be living witnesses to his existence? Not everyone in the world believes that ‘spirits’ exist, or that they are a powerful being at all--based on his memory of Hongjoong’s memory. If these power-crazed men figure out that there are creatures who are stronger than their bullets and empty threats, wouldn’t his existence be. . . threatened? 

He’d be realistic. Believable, maybe. 

But wouldn’t they want to make him perish too? Be the only one who rules the entire patch of the world? Wasn’t that what the war was for? 

Come on, San,  _ think.  _

“How foolish are they?” a man leading the unit chuckles, the laugh ugly and faux intimidating. His moustache is curled and styled, so is his fancy-looking gloves, and there’s a seemingly pricey hat sitting on top of his head, slightly tilted. His assistant doesn’t look so pleased with his deductions, as he looks younger than him and albeit, a bit more respectful. “Do they really think some type of ‘mountain spirit’ will take a hold of us and ram us six feet deep into the core of earth if we start digging up for minerals all the way up here? Some ‘beliefs’ these rejects have, I swear.”

“Sir,” the younger assistant deadpanned, “as we can see from here, there  _ are  _ a few talismans littering these trees. Don’t you think it’s slightly irresponsible and unworthy for us to speak in this manner, especially when our people use the same exact praying methods?”

“Oh, who  _ cares,  _ young man,” the older, slightly more delirious man barks a few sets more of laughter, unaware of the way the rest of the soldiers look at him from a few feet behind them. “There’s nothing wrong with calling out the flaws of an unattractive, failing country,” he spits. “Especially one that hyper focuses on bowing to spirits instead of strengthening their sets of non-existent army. Like that Kim Hongjoong kid. How many days has he been unconscious?”

“Sir,” the assistant frowns again, “what you did to that man and his friends were inhuman.  _ He  _ was unconscious, but his friends weren’t when you put them underground and buried them ali-”

A loud smack was delivered to the cheek of the young assistant, and his previously perfect stance on the horse falters completely as he falls head first onto the ground below him, hoarsely shrieking as his panicked horse stepped on his upper torso. 

And then the old man turns around as an exhibition of power, looking into the eye of each soldier from a country they colonized, ignoring the severe wheezes of pain the assistant is going through on the ground, writhing in pain. No one dares move an inch. 

“So if any of you still  _ dare  _ speak against me behind my back,” he croaks, pointing down at the ground to where the young man is now turning purple, using him as an example. A horrible one at that, his lungs were seemingly broken. “Watch it, from now on.”

As he says so, however, in that disgusting smug and self assured way of his, a tree cracked right above him, falling on top of the man and killing him. Cracked his skull open, the rest of the soldiers are sure. It even spared the horse, funnily enough.

The rest of the soldiers were standing around, frozen as if their feet were rooted on the ground instead of retreating. It’s only after one of the young soldiers points at a certain corner where something glowing was seen did they all scramble here and there, screaming their heads off at how a transparent yet glowing bull-looking-creature was just watching them from a corner. 

It was not a bull. It just had horns.

It  _ was _ San, agitated since he has to finish cleaning up the splatter of a nasty human underneath his sacrificed tree. 

Also, they buried Kim Hongjoong alive?

_ ((Fun fact 2: The talismans are from believers of dynamism, since it was a pretty generic belief especially in countries where modernization hasn’t reached. This story is based upon a colonization era, but since it’s fiction, there is no specific time!)) _

\----

Hongjoong was cleaning something at the stable when Seonghwa came  _ rushing  _ in with buckets of water, spilling here and there. He looks concerned, but then again when is Seonghwa not. Hongjoong tried his best to communicate the fact that they need more horse-soap towards the bolting older teen, but apparently Seonghwa isn’t excited for the horse bathing mission. He’s. . . trying to catch his breath at the moment. And he looks up. 

“Hongjoong-”

“Fuck,” Hongjoong automatically shifts away, looking around, already on a running stance. “What the fuck did I do now-”

“No, no this- this isn’t you at all,” Seonghwa wheezes, putting his right palm over his beating heart, tapping on the surface a few times to calm it down. Hongjoong felt some odd familiarity with this movement, but heed no mind to it. “Come look,” the older waves him over after putting both of his buckets down on the stable’s floors. “Those people the commander was looking for? You know, the so-called rebels who have been blowing up the other camps every now and then, everytime the troops get a promising enough place? They’ve found them.”

Hongjoong tsk-ed, unamused.

“And what’s that got to do with us? I don’t entirely love watching corrupt men beat more kids up. I’ve seen it enough on a daily basis.”

“I don’t know,” Seonghwa shrugs, “I mean, me either, but. This man looks. . . interesting. And you’ve been wanting to know who dug you up from the. . . Anyways. I’ll be back soon after I get enough information on what they’re going to do to him, okay? Just soap ‘em up, or whatever!”

“Won’t those fuckers get mad at you if we all gather on the interrogation?” Hongjoong shouts at his retreating friend, and Seonghwa turns to look at him with disbelief written across his face. “Huh?” Seonghwa aggressively questions, “They were  _ glad  _ that there were a bunch of other kids gathered around the camp when they branded us with those hot fucking irons. The fuck do you think they’d be mad for? They love audiences,” he continues, scratching the back of his head before retreating to the field, where the ‘interrogation’ is being held at. 

Hongjoong, despite knowing too well how Seonghwa copes with the fucked-up nature of being employed by their colonizers--slammed his horse brushes down into the buckets, sighing exaggeratedly. “Fuck it. Seonghwa, wait!  _ You,”  _ he turns around to point fingers at the horses, “don’t start drinking that water. I put soap in it.”

Knowing how little to no human language the horses speak, however, Hongjoong moves the buckets away from their long-necked reach.

And just as Seonghwa said, there  _ is  _ a young man in the middle of their fenced fields. There has also been a makeshift pole where he’s tied onto by the neck in the middle of it, which made Hongjoong cringe a little bit. What kind of- is he  _ not  _ here as human resources?

Since it’s nighttime, there are torches lit on every single space of the wood fences surrounding the field, and the commander’s standing right in front of the young man. Aside from being tied to a pole by his neck, this man is also tied by his hands--not to mention how his mouth is covered by a little braided fabric. There’s blood dripping from the side of his temple, but somehow, Hongjoong can’t look away. Something about this young man is. . . familiar.

The young man’s head is hanging down from his shoulders, and he’s heaving.

Hongjoong shifts closer to where Seonghwa is at, standing at a good distance beside their peers, all watching with squinted eyes and jaws hanging open. Seonghwa, who has been sitting on  _ top  _ of the fence for a while now, stabilizing on both of his hands, finally looks down at Hongjoong--whose face is not any less shocked when compared to the rest of their friend group. 

“Sir  _ San  _ with no surname,” their commander starts out again, bored, seemingly having to repeat this question for the n-th time that night. “Let me ask you again,  _ why  _ and where do you get the courage to join the rebellion, murder most of our valued men, bury them under the dirt of some insignificant mountain, release the rest of our most trusted troops-- _ and  _ retrieved only a few of our lanky, dainty, useless human resources. Hm? Were you trying to make fun of us?”   
“They say this San has been here all day,” Seonghwa whispers, but Hongjoong was more focused on how this ‘San’ guy’s gaze sharpened at the mention of how he buried some men in the mountains. Hongjoong finds it funny, mostly since San also means mountain, quite literally. 

_ Wait.  _

Seonghwa was about to tell Hongjoong another trivia he’s been getting from their other peers when the young man starts making noises while leaning backwards. It took Hongjoong a couple seconds to get what the young man is trying to do. Even though he’s kneeling on the floor in front of the looming commander, this young man is trying to lean away so he can still ‘look down’ on the commander--as he does so while tilting his head so far back.

“Oh,” Seonghwa comments, grinning. “The nerve of this kid.”

At about the same time, the commander laughs at the young man’s attempt of speaking, though muffled by the fabric across his mouth. “The attitude,” the commander looks around, as if to prove a point. “Look at this bastard,” he continues, pulling the fabric across the young man’s mouth down with his shoes, leaving a trail on its wake across San’s cheeks. The young man looks up at him again, seemingly offended. 

“What was it you wanted to tell us? We couldn’t really hear you.”

“Oh,” San wipes his dirtied cheek off as much as he can with his shoulder, tilting his head to the side to get to that point. “Well, hairy-faced man. When you  _ muffled  _ me I wanted to say, get this muffler off of me, I can’t speak my mind. But now that the moment passed, I don’t see a point in saying any of that, so,” he scans the commander up and down, tonguing his cheek in a widely unamused manner. Both Hongjoong and Seonghwa held their breath in.

San started grinning at one point, sensing the commander’s impatience. 

“You’ve got a big gun there,” he coyly remarks, “why not shoot me with it?”

Hongjoong froze, the alarms on his head warning him to turn away right this instance, that he doesn’t want to see these kind of things proceed, that he never should’ve got out from his stable--since at least that way he wouldn’t have to sleep while ridden of guilt the entire night--but he couldn’t look away. It’s as if his brain is also telling him that he needs to find something. But why does that something have to do with a young man from the rebellion? Doesn’t Hongjoong know better about these kids who are raised and brainwashed into breaking every single law?

The young man’s nose cracked as the commander hit him with the stock of his gun. A series of pained ‘ooh’ chimed in from Seonghwa and Hongjoong’s peers, and Hongjoong can clearly see the nose bleeding out from the side of this young man’s profile, but he couldn’t see the face yet. 

“Are you insane?” the commander bursts out laughing. “I don’t  _ need  _ to shoot you for you to die, you son of a bitch. I know damn well that all I need to do is beat you up with it and if I do it long enough you’d-”

He was cut off briefly by San laughing along with him. 

Hongjoong isn’t the only one  _ stunned  _ at this point. The people around the field, who were watching and mumbling among themselves beforehand, are now also; silenced. Not solely because the young man started laughing, apparently, but because he’s now  _ standing up.  _ He also, apparently broke his bindings--though they were made out of rope, which isn’t inherently all that insane, but they knotted that rope together a few times to add to the lack of iron bindings they have around. 

“Commander,” San crooks his nose back in place, cursing while he does it. “Maybe this is just a pattern, huh. Men over-valuing themselves, thinking that they’ve got everything under control when they absolutely do not. Never listening to orders because, oh,  _ you’re  _ a man. And you feel as if it’s unfair to just follow the orders. Because as a man, you feel like you’re placed on this earth to give  _ out  _ orders. Am I wrong, Commander? Hm?” He intimidates the man by walking towards him step by step. Slow, but confident.  _ How  _ is he that confident, Hongjoong isn’t sure. 

Especially with how the Commander is aiming at him with his gun now. Seonghwa is shifting uncomfortably beside Hongjoong, jumping off the fence to stand on both of his feet. “Is he fucking insane?” Seonghwa runs his fingers through his hair. 

“If you were to send me straight to the Lieutenant’s camps, Commander,” San is still talking, “like they  _ told  _ you to.”

The rope around his neck cuts off from how far he is. The pole tilted over to the direction San is walking onto for a few short seconds before the rope snaps, however, and the Commander tries his best to not flinch as the young man takes the barrel of the gun and places it right on top of his heart. 

Hongjoong pulled Seonghwa down from the fences at this point, both of them prepared to look away.

“If you were to follow orders, Commander,” San smiled down at the man, intimidating the man by his repetition of how stupid his decisions were, “you’d probably win us by now.”

Hongjoong has heard several gunshots in his life, but none as bone-crushing as this one. Possibly because he  _ sees  _ how the bullet goes through the young man’s heart, most possibly shattered his ribcage and lungs from how close he stood to the impact point, and the Commander himself gets flinged backwards a few feet away. 

Hongjoong  _ feels  _ movement beside him, feels how Seonghwa’s knee-jerk reaction was to reach up to his own hair and pulls at them. But he feels like he can do nothing. 

He wasn’t as shocked as anyone else because the Commander pulled the trigger, no. What did you expect, honestly, he was a short-tempered man? If this San didn’t die here, that day, his life would be a living hell enough that he’ll die any  _ other  _ time in that camp. He was shocked because. . . well.

Ever since Hongjoong woke up from his supposedly long comma, there’s a certain missing puzzle piece in his head. Something which won’t stop bothering him, no matter how he sleeps, bathes, eats, woke, works.  _ Something.  _ A little later through the weeks, this ‘something’ has culminated in a face. An almost abstract yet realistic face he  _ knows  _ he remembers.

And, believe it or not, call him a lunatic or an indigo--the face he’s been haunted with is perfectly sculpted on this San’s face. 

They all stood frozen for a couple more minutes, hours maybe, Hongjoong doesn’t know for sure. The Commander uses this as a warning, completely boasting about how brave he is in killing a random young man, telling everyone to leave the dead body behind until tomorrow morning. Some people focus on how the tilted pole is half-broken from the sheer strength of San’s pull, and determined if his death is more negative or positive impacting on their point of view. Some other focus on how there’s another captive across from San all-along, a taller man curling in on himself, shaking after watching it all happen--someone they didn’t even notice before since he came only a few hours after San was tied on that makeshift pole. 

The only thing Hongjoong could focus on, however, was how--he swears--that dead man’s eyes just shifted to look at him, and smiled. 

Hongjoong is shaken awake the next morning by Seonghwa and his younger friend, Choi Jongho, who is looking at the two older men with begging puppy eyes. “Hongjoong,” Seonghwa huffs, “Jongho is tasked to. . . you know,” Seonghwa trails off. No, Seonghwa, Hongjoong doesn’t know. Would you like to try again?

“Dispose of. . . the man.”

Hongjoong’s eyes widened.

“Yeah,” Seonghwa chuckles bitterly, “I know.”

“Huh? Uh, yeah, but,” Hongjoong fixes his bed hair, trying to hide his curiosity. “Why are you telling me this, Jongho?”

Seonghwa whacks him in the head, giving Hongjoong that significant eye look he only gives Hongjoong when he fucks up. “B-because,  _ hyung,”  _ Jongho shifts on his seat, messing up the blanket Hongjoong has already tried fixing. Well, he’ll just fix it again. “I’m kind of-”

“Choi Jongho!” an official’s voice hollered out to the youngest between them from the hallway, and Hongjoong watches as how the boy shivers before bowing to his older friends. He runs out of the room almost immediately, not even giving time for Hongjoong to answer. Well. 

Hongjoong and Seonghwa put their shoes on as quickly as they can, strutting over to the door to catch up with Jongho and the official.

“Sir!” 

Jongho’s shoulders seemed relieved from the back as he notices their appearance, and Hongjoong pulls Seonghwa’s shoulders to give the official a formal bow. “We’d like to help Jongho with his task, please Sir!”

Which they do with great lethargicness, since, well. 

It’s a dead body. 

They even stalled enough time in searching for the body bag kept in the stables--oddly enough--while letting Jongho converse with the other captive they’ve got across from San’s location. When the two older men come around to the field, however, Jongho’s face is ridden with more than anxiety. It’s more akin to fear, and for fuck’s sake, do Hongjoong  _ know  _ how fear looks like.

Seonghwa sighs, walking around in circles before finally taking a brave glance at San’s immobile body. “Fuck,” he curses, feeling his stomach churn before looking away again. 

_ “Hyung,”  _ Jongho pulls at Seonghwa’s sleeves, pointing at the other captive, who is now sitting in a more respectful manner if compared to last night. He also is a suspect of the soldiers since he  _ actually  _ admits to being a rebel in the rebellion, but since San was a bit more. . . talkative yesterday, the entire fiasco happened. He has been crying in fear the entire night, this other captive--well, obviously, since your comrade gets shot in front of you--but not anymore. There are streaks of tears on his cheeks and his eyes are puffy, but he looks slightly more calm, per say. 

Seonghwa nods at him to acknowledge his existence, but then Jongho starts talking as if he wasn’t  _ just  _ trying to make sure Seonghwa exchanged greetings with this captive man.

“His name is Yunho. And he said something. . . frightening.”

Seonghwa pulls Jongho away from the captive’s side almost immediately, frowning upon hearing the words from Jongho’s mouth. “What did you say to him?” he questions, shifting away step by step, noticing how some other officials start paying attention to their exchange. Well, or not. Maybe it’s almost time for the morning ceremony and they need to hurry up in their cleaning. “Get back, Jongho, we have a lot to do-”

“No,  _ hyung,  _ it’s not like that!” Jongho stops Seonghwa’s movement from proceeding, and Seonghwa wonders how strong Jongho’s grip is around his biceps, since they’re starting to hurt a little bit. “He said-”

“-isn’t dead.”

The horns signaling the start of the morning ceremony was blown, and Seonghwa had to lean forward to listen to what Yunho said some more, but Hongjoong, who puts two and two together faster than anyone in this circle as of this moment, turns around to look at San’s body. 

To his surprise (not), it  _ moves.  _

_ “san yu-ryeong  _ isn’t dead.”

Of fucking course he isn’t.

“San what now?!” Seonghwa yelps, turning around to look at the other side, managing to pull Jongho behind him yet again for the second time that morning. He stretches his hand out for Hongjoong, tirelessly shouting at his friend. “Kim Hongjoong come here right now! Come here! Hongjoong?” 

But Hongjoong, as well as several hundred more people around the camp’s field, are way too engrossed in the fact that San--who died last night--is moving yet again. He’s contorting here and there, almost like a hot air balloon coming back to life. There’s a certain jerky movement as he does this which was so familiar yet so terrifying to Hongjoong he almost pisses himself. He doesn’t, however, and was traumatized enough to remember something he wasn’t supposed to. 

“Oh!” Hongjoong shouts in recollection, covering his mouth as he falls on his bottom, pointing frantically at San’s body, now alive enough to move into a seating position. Minus the few guns clicking in the back as soldiers take aim and the rest of the kids muttering about scientific World War experiments, the scenario was deemed calm enough as San looked up at the quartet in front of him, tilting his head at them. To one in particular.

“Kim Hongjoong?” he clasps his hands, standing up to dust his pants off. “I knew it was you I saw. Though the last time I saw you, and a couple other friends of yours, you were almost six-feet under. And you were a bit dirtier. With literal dirt on your face!” 

Hongjoong doesn’t say anything, not because he doesn’t know what to say. Because it’s that fucking creature he saw at the climb a few weeks ago, he’s sure of it. That spirit! The one with the horns and mosses all over his body. He looks different now, but Hongjoong is so sure.

Seonghwa took this quiet chance to pull Hongjoong by the collar to his side, hiding him behind his back while actively trying to avoid an eye-contact with San. Yunho is half-holding a terrified Jongho, who is crying, and half hiding a smile. 

“Question,” San approaches the bunch of humans before him, mostly crying and hunched on eachother. “How do people keep knowing my name? You said it back then,” he points at Hongjoong, whose eyes went wide immediately, and then he points at Yunho, “and you’ve been saying it since I got shot. Do you know me for educational purposes, or,” San frowns. “Can’t be that,” he shrugs, “even I didn’t get to know my own name for a while.”

“It’s a long story,  _ san yu-ryeong.  _ But my family has kept stories about you very safe for centuries, so maybe, they’ll be able to tell you.”

It was Yunho who said it, much less with fiery and excited eyes. 

“But sadly,” the tall man continues, “to get there, we need to get out of here.”

San looks at him catatonically for a while, before he sighs. The sigh was severe enough to shock the three other men aside from Jongho, and San spared them a weird side-eye. “Fine,” San shrugs, helping Yunho up on his feet, kicking the bindings on the latter’s ankles off. “I wasn’t planning on staying for a long time, anyways. I let myself get caught since I wanted to self-sacrifice so you and your pretty friend can get away, but apparently  _ you  _ got stuck here, too.”

Since San looks as if he’s talking to literally anyone and everyone in between, Yunho had to take a second guess at who exactly he was talking to.

_ “My  _ pretty friend,  _ san yu-ryeong?”  _ Yunho points at himself.

The conclusion made San shrug. “Well, yes?”

This invited a snort out of Yunho, who immediately realized how ill-mannered snorting in front of a deity is, who then quickly apologized. “I’m sorry,  _ san yu-ryeong,  _ it’s just that. . . well, I think you’ve got a keen eye.”

San was intrigued enough to ask what the man means, but decided against it since he assures himself that there’s a lot about human nature that he doesn’t know of. Maybe he’ll need to learn of their linguistics abilities and quirks, too, to gain their trust. Why would he want to do that, when his ultimate goal was to make sure his new friend Kim Hongjoong is still alive and well? He doesn’t really know, but after a few weeks of eavesdropping on the human’s power dynamics, he decided that it’d be  _ kind of  _ nice to ruin some of their lives with trauma. 

Listen, he’s not a god at any sorts. He’s a mountain spirit. It’s up to him to act nice to other creatures of the world, or not to. 

Seeing a dead humanoid deity come back to life is surely traumatizing enough, wouldn’t it be? 

“So we should escape,” San repeats again, finally ripping his attention off of the four humans he particularly placed himself beside. Analyzing things isn’t his strongest feature, as was proven by the fact that he’s evacuated his mountain habitants a few times more than necessary anytime human-related dangers come near, but there  _ are  _ some things San feels as worth mentioning out loud, since, maybe it could help his plan building. 

“Guns hurt,” he concludes, looking over to his four new friends--well, for  _ him,  _ since Jongho is still crying at the sight of this alive, dead-man. “I wouldn’t die from guns, but I’d be slightly hurt. For a day? No, that’s only because he shot me once. If it hurts that much for me, humans would die. Wouldn’t you?” he asks the nearest person to him, which happens to be Seonghwa. “Y-” Seonghwa stammers, finally coming in eye-to-eye contact with the mountain spirit, “Yes, Sir, we would.”

San frowns at the answer, racking his brain for more escape devices. He got one, but that would mean team-work. He’s not sure how good  _ these  _ men are at working together, but. Well, it won’t hurt them to try it?

Maybe he needs to explain how it works as fast as he can, though, since the Commander who shot him is now walking angrily out of his cabin and  _ that  _ can only go one way or another. San isn’t really keen on being shot and then burned, as what the soldiers were whispering about last night. That would. . . hurt. And exhaust him of all of his other spirit privileges, or so he’s heard from Washi--who keeps educating him on things like this when he was a little younger--since healing from death by burnt scars would literally assimilate to just being reborn. 

Talking about being reborn, they need to run away.

“I’m not as powerful as I could’ve been,” San whispers, looking at his human friends discreetly, “but I’ll protect you from the bullets, so just run. When the ground starts moving,” he plants both his hands onto the ground below him, “start running. Take your friends and go.”

“Huh?!” Seonghwa asked yet again, and Hongjoong took this chance to guide the rest of his peers' hands around his own. 

“You heard me,” San smiles at Seonghwa--who sees it as intimidating but doesn't tell anyone-- then continues to pull Yunho to his side. “Yunho, you come with me.”

And, to be quite frank with everyone, Seonghwa, unlike Hongjoong--though they live in the same religiously fanatic neighborhood, especially about the spirits--have never been that much of a believer. So yes, he’s distraught, he’s scared of this man who comes back to life and he’s scared of how everyone knows who he is  _ except  _ him--good job, Seonghwa, maybe if you paid attention to your mother’s teachings about spirits and traditions--but he wasn’t sure. He was sure that this San guy is a whole other breed, that’s for sure, and for a split second yesterday, Seonghwa was  _ sure  _ he’d like San because of his attitude, but now he’s just scared, okay? Out of his mind. 

Why would the ground even shake on command? Is that what the spirits are capable of? And if it is, why wouldn’t he just, maybe, bend the ground to their need? Throw everyone off their horses--literally, and not literally. How would it even w-

“Wait-” Seonghwa falls face-first on the ground when it  _ actually  _ starts shaking. Both Hongjoong and Jongho also tripped behind him, but Hongjoong, as the one who looked the most determined out of everyone, got on his feet the fastest to drag Seonghwa and Jongho, following their predetermined plan. It’s a good thing Hongjoong has a strong enough feet to keep standing  _ and  _ running throughout this scenario, since Seonghwa is a few hundred percent sure he’s never been through an earthquake that is as merciless as this one. He stole another glance at San and Yunho, and sure enough, the infamous humanoid mountain spirit looks unaffected.

San even caught Seonghwa looking at him and shouted at the human to move his ass quicker. Seonghwa ponders who taught the spirit  _ that  _ kind of language for days, and maybe years after, but at the time, he was too focused on relaying the message to the rest of his peers to quickly evacuate. 

The trio wondered if they are then obliged to build a shrine for  _ san yu-ryeong  _ once they’ve settled down in a good place for what he’d done for them that day.

San takes little to no interest over the long road back to Yunho’s ‘civilization’. He was more concerned with how they were both sitting on a horse they managed to steal from the camp they’ve recently left, but even as San sits on top of the galloping mass of creature, he feels nothing negatively not content radiating from anywhere around him. Weird, since San is pretty sure none of his friends at home would be appreciating two--equally heavy human-shaped things--on their back, no matter the time of the day.

What  _ got  _ his attention was the sound of another horse galloping towards them, however, and the excited movement of Yunho’s arm. He has yet to see people in real life do it, since everyone in the camp was so cold and disinterested towards him--like a flock of buzzing bees who would sting him anytime he gets close, no matter the hierarchy he’s sitting atop of--but he’s seen it from Kim Hongjoong’s memories. It’s a greeting ritual. Maybe not a ritual, since just moving your hand from side to side like what Yunho is doing isn’t considered complicated, but it is repetitive. What should it be called, then?

As the mountain spirit drowned in his own thoughts, however, he caught sight of someone familiar. The horse they mounted slowly decreased its speed to a full stop, and San  _ finally  _ heard a voice.

To describe what he felt when he heard the voice was. . . another challenge.

“Yunho!” the voice chirped. Though San describes it as so; chirping--there’s a certain tune of uncertainty accompanying it. It made San feel as if Yunho had done something wrong, but not entirely, and the owner of said voice was simply worried. But the voice wouldn’t sound like a chirp if it wasn’t laced with several layers of anxiety. It’d simply be like. . . the deep, resonating sound of water. Trickling down a waterfall and hitting a rock before completely disparaging in somewhat beautiful and harmonious waves of a serene sound. 

So he looks. Beyond Yunho’s broad shoulders, to the person sitting atop of another horse across from them, meeting the eyes of a stranger who finds him in the exact moment he found the stranger. It feels like their gaze lingered. 

“You’ve brought. . .” the stranger’s voice faltered from worry to curiosity, “a friend.”

Yunho chuckles in front of San--not like the mountain spirit even paid any attention, his eyes were still hyper focused on the newcomer--scanning the stranger up and down. “You look interested,” the taller man disturbs the ongoing moment,  _ “Yeosang.” _

San never felt his head whip any faster. 

It was so strange to him. So. . . familiar, yet so blatantly new and wonderful. That sounded like a gorgeous name, judging from the fact that he has both heard some other human names and the other fact. The fact that he hasn’t heard many other names. But maybe he’s biased, since as we all know: he’s seen Yeosang before.

_ “That’s  _ your pretty friend’s name?” San whispers, trying to hide his face behind Yunho’s back yet again. Yunho gave him an intrigued side-eye, masking a smile. “Yes,  _ san yu-ryeong.”  _

“Yunho-” San starts protesting as the taller man giddies up their horse to walk again, now in much of a less rushed manner, knowing they won’t have to catch up to any agenda. “Isn’t calling me  _ san yu-ryeong  _ too hard for you? Too long?”

The conversation of San asking Yunho to ‘just call him San’ was so immersive for the mountain spirit that he missed the frozen shock on Yeosang’s face as he took all of this new information in. It’s a different type of shock, if only San could see. It’s nothing like what Seonghwa and Jongho presented on their faces when San proved himself to be the previously acclaimed mountain spirit. It’s something else entirely.

But, alas.

The civilization--or as Yunho explained, his homeland, though can also be referred to as a village based on how small it is--is completely packed with humans. Just as the camp, yet they wear completely different things. There were no jingly belts from how irons meet each other, there were little to no soles underneath their naked feet, there were also no silly things on top of their heads to adorn them, and San can clearly see the different forms of their hair. This attracted his right hand to his own forehead, pondering over how he could return his lack of horns. They just shrink and disappear one day, after he stayed down for weeks trying to look for Kim Hongjoong. Maybe Yunho’s family could tell him how to find it back. Maybe. 

He should’ve asked Washi. Wouldn’t that be an easier process?

“Welcome to the utopia,” Yunho dismounted himself from the horse, reaching out to help San--who needed none of it but reached for the man’s hand either way, which were gloved, something he paid little attention to beforehand--and continued with an awkward-sounding, “San.” It almost sounded like he’s testing out how it feels. 

“What’s a utopia?” San questions, already somewhat overwhelmed by the chattering noises of people going here and there and Yunho’s peers running all over the place to greet him. Yunho gave little thought to his question before answering, and this is the most confident San has ever seen the man. “Simply? Something akin to the heavens,” he shrugs, sparing both San and Yeosang a meaningful glance before rushing forward to greet his friends. 

This notified San that Yeosang was beside him all along, however, holding on to his white horse’s mane with little to no expressions. His eyes were fixated on Yunho, but his entire stature was aware and stiff--not giving leeway for San to say anything whatsoever. Though Yeosang’s eyes were elsewhere, San felt watched. Observed. Studied. 

So it was only natural that he scanned Yeosang, too. Obviously. 

San could bear nothing else but to watch. It was quite windy in the mostly nomadic village, flaps of tents slapping each other here and there and palm trees swaying way above their heads. The wind caused little to no disturbance for Yeosang, that much San realized--but it did mess with his overgrown bi-coloured hair. His hair was nearing white on the bottom, but was the darkest of jet black from their roots. San was briefly reminded of a zebra, or a skunk, but neither of those compared to the almost grace of this man. No, not almost. Definitely. More than definitely. Yeosang is an entire definition of grace itself. 

His eyes were also. . . seemingly  _ sculpted by the gods.  _ There were strings around his neck, though it doesn’t seem uncomfortable. Unlike the rope around San’s neck from yesterday’s round of being murdered in public, the strings look loose enough to stay around Yeosang’s neck, but not in a painful way. What are they for, then?

“It’s a necklace,” Yeosang opens his mouth for the first time--not the very first time, but the first time since he wasn’t talking to San before this, but technicalities don’t really matter, does it?--and from his little satchel he pulls an apple out with his left hand. “There’s nothing quite useful about it, but I wear it to signify something.”

There are two, San thought to himself, noticing the difference in each stone. Those  _ are  _ stones, he further thought, and maybe he leaned away a little bit to take more of it in. It suits Yeosang somehow, with his overly unbothered face and pristine posture. “Yes, there’s two of them,” Yeosang further confirms, and San is beginning to get a little freaked out. Not completely, since everything he’s seen before this was weird, always. But mind-reading humans? Unheard of. 

“They’re gemstones.”

Yeosang leaves not long after that, walking side by side with his white horse. It follows him blindly, as if it understood where to go, though San barely heard Yeosang say anything to it. Can humans  _ also  _ communicate any other way? This is all way too much information for one day. 

San pays attention to the fading shadows of Yeosang’s long braid, swinging here and there on his back as he walks away. He briefly almost crossed paths with an overly-excited Yunho, holding someone else by the arm, seemingly as excited as he is--but Yeosang took a left turn a few seconds before Yunho could see him, and now he’s gone. Just like mist. 

That’s it, San told himself.

Yeosang’s entire existence reminded him of a mist. 

But how could he be even half of a good judge for what Yeosang is? He’s barely been alive for that long. 

“San y- San!” Yunho’s voice beckoned him over, and San’s eyes snapped upwards to finally meet Yunho’s excited ones. An equally tall man is standing beside him, moving his right arm from side to side just as Yunho did when they met Yeosang. It must be the greeting ritual, then, San told himself. The newcomer--there’s quite a lot of people he’s been coming across, all because of Yunho--looks as nice and welcoming as Yunho himself is, however, and it settled down the spiking curiosity in San’s kidneys as of this moment. Maybe it’s not curiosity, there has to be another name for this elevating. . . worry.

He’d ask Yunho when the time comes.

“Hi,” San greets as he skids over to where the two men are, and Yunho’s friend returns his soft greeting with a loud ‘hello’. The loudness felt wholesome, and it brought a bit more smile on San’s face than he can usually muster up. “This is Song Mingi, a friend of mine. Technically, all of the people around here are well-versed in spirit-related religious beliefs but, well,” Yunho scratches the back of his neck, “I kinda lied. My family do not.”

San tilts his head at the word ‘lie’. That’s new.

“Why?” San voices out, despite not knowing how bad of a lie it even was. It wasn’t that bad--but since Yunho’s heartbeat sounded irregular to him, he felt the need to ask since it was all he knew to do. Coaxing his animal friends to come to him when they were in pain always worked best with questions. To be fair, he never voiced his questions out loud before, so maybe this was the wrong thing to do since Yunho’s head dropped defeatedly.

“They don’t exist anymore, San,” Yunho laughs awkwardly, scratching the back of his neck, “my family, I mean.” His soul sounds high and lonely.  _ Oh.  _

San clasps his right hand over his mouth, thoughts running over his head a hundred miles per hour. He doesn’t  _ know  _ how to apologize in a language Yunho understands yet, but he knows he needs to. Losing their family is a topic nobody enjoys talking about. San should’ve known better when he first heard the whir of Yunho’s heartbeat slowing down and picking up at the same time. It was too obvious to miss. Yet he still did.

He swears it’s because he’s overwhelmed. Or he’s too far from his domain. Maybe even a mixture of both. 

So he does what he’s done all the time to apologize to his friends who weren’t able to talk. Even though  _ he’s  _ the one who feels like he absolutely can not muster words right now.

San reaches over to cling both his hands over Yunho, careful to not repeat the same accident he had with Kim Hongjoong but engulfing him in most of his arms, even though they’re not as comfortable as they could’ve been. He would even--politely--ask for the little travelling birds to stop by and sing for someone he’s trying to apologize to, if now is like back then, as a caretaker of his mountain, but he’s different. . . as of this moment. And he was very unsure of himself. So he gives Yunho as much as he was able to.

“Thank you, San,” Yunho mumbles, reaching out of San’s grip to pat his back. It was comforting, unlike Kim Hongjoong’s skin-to-skin contact which almost burned his hand. Dramatic, but it was what it felt like. But Yunho wears gloves, and there’s a piece of fabric engulfing San’s torso, so maybe it’s not all that different. “But it happened ages ago, and I don’t really feel as sad as I was.”

That was wrong. A lie, was it? Like he said.

San looks up at Yunho and his friend, who both shared a knowing look but said the exact opposite. Why do humans do this, San wonders, and not just say what’s on their mind? He’d have to learn more about those. The lack of synchronization on what the humans say and what they sound like threw him over a tiny loop, but he shook it off the same way he released his grip on Yunho--out of confusion. 

“But Mingi here works with documents!” Yunho says, trying to bring up the atmosphere. San doesn’t notice this, since he’s unaware of why the atmosphere was bad in the first place. It felt fine and dandy to him. Sadness is, for lack of a better word, quite normal.

“Yeah,” Mingi agrees again, a tad bit louder than Yunho. Unwillingly, San’s lips curled into an amused smile. It was involuntary, but there’s just something about Mingi’s voice. It made him feel jumpy, like he would whenever he spots a perfect cumulonimbus cloud.

“We don’t have that much documents- wait, that's wrong, we do. But we never stay in one place for too long to build a library, so we store it in a semi-permanent wooden-made building. The elders usually come out there to pray, but since I’m in charge of the documents they keep in the prayer place, I was given a tent to live nearby,” Mingi beckons the two to follow him, yet San notices how the man still holds Yunho by the hand. This made him smile a little bit more. Yunho didn’t realize.

“Have you seen Yeosang anywhere, San?” Yunho looks around, and Mingi’s step falters to a stop in the middle of an intersection. The two of them conversed among themselves for a short while--San is able to hear everything but he’ll pretend he doesn’t since he’s focusing on a small version of a human looking at him from across the road, holding hands with her mother with big curious eyes. It’s probably because he’s wearing a shirt with a big rip on his upper torso, right below his heart. He’d think it’s inappropriate if the wound was still open, but it’s long healed. And it’s not like he could walk around with an open wound?

“I did see him, you left me with him earlier,” San replies after he manages to rip his eyes away from the small human. “But he left after a short meaningless conversation. He took a left in that corner. You almost bumped into him.”

Yunho snorts again at this, and San wonders deeply, at this point, if his way of speaking really is that humorous for humans. Or maybe it’s just for Yunho, since Kim Hongjoong and his friends weren’t really laughing when they saw him. 

“He’s probably avoiding the elders again,” Mingi chuckles too, taking San by the hand too, now, before they took off to the highlands. “Why would Yeosang avoid anyone?” San questions, and he absentmindedly hopes he doesn’t sound a bit more curious than all the other inquiries he’s been voicing out. He can’t help it, Yeosang is so intriguing to find out about. 

“Not everyone,” Yunho denies, but while he looks up at the sky to look for other things that entails Yeosang’s personality, Mingi cuts him off. “Yeah. It’s just hard for a spirit like him to live around a civilization filled with religious spiritual worshipers, and he’s never wanted to be treated as special--but the elders just do. If you want a peaceful life,  _ san yu-ryeong,”  _ Mingi spared him a glance, eyes smiling, “I suggest you avoid the elders of this place. They’re nice, but, eh. Kind of. . . overbearing, when they want to pray for you. Or  _ to  _ you.”

Wait.

“Mingi,” Yunho whined at this, and Mingi stops yet again. San barely heard the two while they bicker back and forth, but he caught a piece of complaint from Yunho that sounded most definitely like: “I was curious on how long it’ll take for San to catch up with it. Now there’s barely any surprise left for him.”

“Nonsense, Yunho,” Mingi denies, “everything is a mystery when it comes to Yeosang. You’re his longest friend, you know this.”

In the middle of that, San is having something we like to call: an existential crisis. Oh, but he doesn’t know what it’s called. He just calls it; ‘an overwhelming sensation of shock and disbelief.’

He breaks it down in his head somewhat like this.

Another spirit? Washi has never told him that. And his eagle friend is somewhat the only mentor he’s had the entirety of the time he’s been awake. He would’ve told him other spirits are around, correct? Unless they weren’t around, and they didn’t want San to go look for other spirits. But why? Because there’s only a few and they’re far in between, or because there are humans out there that could harm him? But he needed a friend, don’t you think? The animals had friends. The plants had friends, though they die faster than the animals--not necessarily, but in general terms, they do. The rocks and the moving earth have each other.

San never had. . . anyone.

Weird. Weird, weird, weird. 

Was that the empty feeling he’s had for almost the entirety of his life? Having nobody around?

He came out of the grainy, rocky grounds of the mountain all by himself, pulled his entire body out of the ground by himself, reached around on the ground to feel the warm blades of grass in one summertime by himself, laid on top of the ground for a good minute. . . by himself. Confused, alone, and overwhelmed. 

He never complained, however, never even thought of a different kind of lifestyle. He thought that whatever he had was meant for him. It was what he got in store, and it was what he had to do until the day he completely disappeared. If he even could, you know. Disappear. 

But there is a spirit, he finds out, that coexists with humans? Willingly? Does that mean he’s the spirit who manages this barren land? No. Mingi told them they move around a lot, and though it doesn’t mean they move around every five to ten minutes it meant that there is no way they keep coming back to Yeosang’s domains. Unless they expand. He’s never heard of that. 

But there’s a lot of things San has never heard of!

There’s also the fact that Mingi said how Yunho is Yeosang’s longest friend, which meant the friendship was mutual--since Yeosang sounded worried. To worry about someone is to have a deep connection with them, wouldn’t you say? Which means Yeosang has been around for a long time. 

San is staggering at this point, not even noticing Yunho’s hands reaching for him.

Not all spirits need territories, then? Was he the only one that did? Is he the weakest one among them? Is there even a hierarchy on top of the hierarchy he’s established? 

Does this mean he’s in desperate need to come back home before he dies, or?

_ Do we even die? _

“San?” - it was Yunho. In front of them was, as they’ve told San, a semi-permanent building. It was also wood-based, as the wooden-gate he saw on Kim Hongjoong’s campsite at the foot of his mountain, but these woods aren’t as smooth. They aren’t polished, it seems, to look flawless. They look just as lively and realistic as the ones San has seen on trees. Yunho took notice of his wandering eyes, and nodded to himself. 

“We tried to look for older woods, ones which fell from old age,” he fumbled with the doorknob around the same time San paid him the attention he sought for. “I’m sorry if it bothers you in any way. We could read it outside?”

“Right!” Mingi chimes in, finally finished with assessing the situation. “I’ll take the necessary history lessons out here. You can. . .” he puts one hand on San’s shoulder, carefully avoiding the skin since unlike Yunho, Mingi wasn’t wearing any gloves. “You can ask Yunho about things while I rummage through a mountain of documents first.”

Mingi ended the sentence with a wink, but San doesn’t understand what the wink was for. 

The stairs leading to the prayer place were made of concrete, however, though it doesn’t connect to the ground in any shape or form. Yunho explained how it was because they couldn’t find any more naturally dead logs of woods when they got here, so they built a staircase with a mold. It wasn’t connected to the ground so the spirits of the land wouldn’t have such a hard time adjusting to the differences they made, and after they leave they usually smash anything concrete off to make it look just like regular rocks. 

“Why do you think of the spirits and what they think?” San frowns, reminiscing the slander on his name he witnessed by that one old man who bothered his territory a few weeks ago. You know, the one he smashed with a tree. He still felt bad. But not really. He doesn’t, but please don’t tell anyone. 

“Oh,” Yunho grins, “that’s sort of easy. Textbook-wise, my answer would be: ‘Because just like us, the spirits were given a job to do and somewhere to be. They’re just a tad bit more powerful than what humans are blessed with. And to gain the favour of these wonderful mythical deities, we need to do our best to please them, just so we could coexist peacefully, and maybe they’d bless us with health and a longer life if we treat them accordingly.’”

San wonders if he can do any of that. But then again, he’s never met a human who wants to simply live on his mountain.

. . .or maybe he smashed them off with a tree.

Hey, they were planning to drill through his mountain for little pesky minerals. The tree-smashing was warranted. 

“But if you  _ really  _ ask Jeong Yunho,” the man continues, “I might have a different answer.”

“What’s your answer, Jeong Yunho?” San asks without missing a beat. This invited a nostalgic cloud over Yunho’s eyes, and San noticed, but heed no mind. Living is that way. Looking at past memories hurts, more or less. But Yunho’s hurting a little bit more than what San is used to. 

“Because those spirits saved me,” he says, and then as if he remembered something, turns around to look at San. “Twice, at this point in my life. Too much for someone as insignificant as me. But I’d be eternally grateful, either way, doesn’t matter if I think I don’t deserve it.”

San rests his chin on one of his hands, listening to the noisy whirring wind that leaves his hair messed up and unnatural. 

“Who’s the first one?”

“Hm?”

“Who saved you the first time?” San repeats, still not looking at Yunho. He doesn’t need to look. He can feel the emotions spiking up and down. Yunho hums at this, dusting off his palms. “You sure you don’t want to know about the second one more? It might help you in life,” he teases, and San snorts. He doesn’t even know he can make such a noise. He sounds like a little piglet. “I’d know little by little about the second one the more I live my life,” San waves the man off, “now tell me about the first one.”

Yunho is grabbing something around his neck. It’s a necklace, if San remembers correctly. Like the one Yeosang has around his neck. There’s a split second projection of Yeosang in his head, looking almost entirely different than what he saw the first and second time--but San ignored it. It can’t be. He can’t look that divine. That’d be a crime. 

“His name was Wooyoung. He was a spirit of friendship,” Yunho starts explaining, which drove San to an even bigger disconnect from reality. It’s not Yeosang? There’s another one? Where is he now? Is he here? He sounds more approachable than Yeosang is, though his name was not as gracious-sounding. Could he talk to San? 

“Wooyoung appears, as he himself claimed, when there are friendship bonds stronger than the type of friends you found along the way. I don’t know  _ what  _ drew him to me and my uphill village, but he arrived one day with his friend in tow. He looked normal. I didn’t even know Wooyoung was any sort of spirit until later on. But it was weird,” Yunho huffs, reminiscing even further. “He claimed to appear only after strong friendship bonds were created. But he came to me. And I had no friend.”

San looks over to Yunho, not liking how much he relates. Shouldn’t a friendship spirit come to him too, then? Or do spirits not work on other spirits?

“His friend was Yeosang. Yet another spirit. He’s the only reason Wooyoung can even go anywhere, ever--since he’s a travelling spirit. _.  _ Wooyoung kept saying they come in pairs after I came to know what they are, but he must’ve been lying, or something,” Yunho chuckles uncomfortably, “you came by yourself.”

“That wasn’t the point, sorry, uhm,” Yunho shakes off the atmosphere again, even though San was about to agree. It’s a weird concept for him to hear. Spirits having friends, he means. Though with his own logic, if everything has some sort of spirit, wouldn’t he be surrounded by friends in his mountain? There are a  _ lot  _ of things spirits can reside in up there. Why was he alone, and why was he responsible?

“Anyways, my little uphill village was demolished when a war started. It was a couple of years ago, yet until now there’s little to no retribution from the war criminals. That doesn’t matter, anyways. I hated Wooyoung and Yeosang for a while, for saving me and only me. Not my parents, not my siblings, not the older and more influential kids from our village. Me.”

“I didn’t see it as them saving me, however. I demonized them for a while, even when they kept me living in a hidden place. Fed me, kept me clean. I still saw it as them ruining my life. Maybe I was depressed, since those times were so lonely. Spirits never felt the need to talk, so they don’t unless I talk to them. They communicate in other ways, and I never  _ wanted  _ to talk to them.”

San felt the pain yet again. Almost as much as Kim Hongjoong’s memories felt like a burn on his hand. As painful as the gun’s bullet, even, the one which struck him through the rib. 

“And Wooyoung felt like I needed a friend. A real one, someone I can hug and hold hands with. So they left me.”

“And Mingi’s family found you?” San takes a random guess which isn’t so randomly generated. There’s something in him which felt like he knew, but at the same time, he probably doesn’t. “And Mingi’s family found me,” Yunho nods, not even surprised that San took the right guess. This entire thing felt oddly familiar, yet San couldn’t even put a finger on it. 

“For the longest time after that, I kept saying it was a coincidence. That Wooyoung and Yeosang really did give up on trying to keep me alive, and left me behind for the night to take over. It didn’t register how incredibly odd it is that Mingi’s family found me before the sun even sets. Only when Yeosang found me five years ago do I realize it wasn’t.”

San looks over to Yunho, who looks back at him. The mountain spirit gave him a sign to continue, but maybe take a breather if he wants to--but Yunho continues nonetheless. He doesn’t look hurt even in the slightest, though his heart sounded like the weeping droplets of rain San is all-too-familiar with. 

“Wooyoung wasn’t with him. Not since the day they left me to find new friends who would take me in. Yeosang said they parted since Wooyoung had to lead Mingi’s family to me, and that they’d meet after Wooyoung knows I’m safe and sound. But they never did.”

The door behind them creaked open, and Mingi’s heavy footsteps were magnified by the heavy documents he had on his arms. He sounds heavier than usual, but the grunts are still the same; determination-wise.

San watches the palm trees sway.

“Yeosang is sure that if we wear friendship necklaces with a gemstone that friendship spirits were associated with, we’d be able to call him home. But I’ve known for a long time that he doesn’t mean we’re this home he’s been talking about, either,” Yunho shrugs, moving up to help Mingi with his documents. “He means himself. He’s Wooyoung’s home. He wants to call him back. He just doesn’t know how to, or if Wooyoung even exists anymore for him to hear the calling.”

He doesn’t know if Wooyoung even exists anymore.

Mingi and Yunho banter as they set up the most important documents from the least important ones, letting San digest each and every word Yunho just put into his brain. 

If there are no concrete reasons for a spirit’s existence and dis-existence, does it mean whatever they do, either right or wrong--would mean absolutely nothing? Wouldn’t it? Even spirits like Yeosang don't know the concept of how one of them completely goes missing, and he’s on the brink of desperation thinking of ways to call him back. Is Wooyoung dead? Can they actually die, then?

“What do you want to know,  _ san yu-ryeong?”  _ Mingi asks, sitting cross-legged while leaning on both of his arms that are placed somewhere behind him. “San is fine,” San huffs, nudging the first batch of opened papers binded together by fabric-made strings in the middle of tiny, looped holes. “I’d say everything, but you don’t have all day.”

“I have all day, kind of,” Yunho leans forward, eyes crinkling when he notices the first book San picks up. “I mean. . .” Mingi chimes in, noticing the look Yunho gives him, “if you wanted to know more about the travelling spirit why not ask Yeosang himself?”

“I think he’s got himself in the same amount of clusterfuck I’m currently in,” San scans over the first page as fast as he can, not even surprised with how he barely got any word in. Human alphabets are both weirdly endearing and scary. “So I wouldn’t bother him about the things he also doesn't know about. Maybe later. When my mental capacity is clear.”

Mingi shoves at his friend, which invited San out of the so-called Yeosang biography. “What?” he questions, noticing how disturbed Mingi looks.

“Did you teach the mountain spirit how to curse, you dumbass?!” Mingi screeches, still shoving at Yunho with his feet. The latter is dodging all the shoves as best as he can, but still rounded up with three out of five hits. “I didn’t, I swear. He probably got it from somewhere else, Mingi, I met him in a concentration camp, for fuck’s sake.”

“In a what?” Mingi frowns, growing more concerned. “Yeah,” Yunho scratches his hair, sparing San--who was already looking at him--a glance. “And they shot him.”

“Anyways!” San stops the conversation before it gets out of hand. “Why can I see people’s memories when I touch their skin?”

“Because you can,” Mingi fixes his hair before pulling his pair of glasses out of the midst of their messy paper towers. “And that’s why we’re mostly prohibited from touching spirits, even if they ask us to. It could hurt them, especially if we’ve been through a lot.”

“Hurt us?” San asks, the bells in his head ringing from familiarity. Yes, it hurted a lot. 

“Yeah,” Mingi shoves a bundle of papers onto his lap, though he isn’t even looking at it. “The emotions--or, in spirit-worship language; vibration--that spirits mostly feel are neutral. So, non-existent. They could deal with positive ones naturally, though most of them get swayed into feeling super happy whenever they’re faced with positive emotions. I do that a lot,” he fixes his glasses cockily, and San could see Yunho roll his eyes, though not knowing what the gesture means. “I don’t think swaying emotions are the only thing you do, Mingi,” Yunho provides, but the other man shushes him with a dismissive wave. 

“Anyways, so whenever they touch something with more negative emotions than positive, for example rage, fear, anxiety, doubt, vengeance and whatnot--they’d get hurt. Stung, mostly, from what I hear Yeosang say. But I saw Yeosang try consoling a crying Yunho once, and he leaped away immediately as if it burned. They could, usually, neutralize those down if they touch the creature with negative emotions again, but the neutralizing way is almost too inhumane, if not for someone who is in a full blown panic attack.”

“Why is it inhumane?” San questions, basically leaning on the papers as of right now. “Well, because it knocks humans out like a light. If the spirits have never done this before, it could harm them too. Yeosang experienced anxiety the first time he put Yunho to sleep without guidance, and it lasted for about two weeks, since that’s how long it took for him to wake up. It was terrifying. He looked like a walking corpse.”

“But the wording is kind of faulty, anyways,” Yunho adds from the side, “the ‘without guidance’ part. I don’t know what happened to the spirits these days, but three out of the three I’ve met never had any guidance to their life. They just appear one day, seemingly brainwashed and were told to live their life. Yeosang and- his friend- had never said anything about being guided by an older, more experienced spirit. And San here doesn’t even know other spirits exist, until now.”

“It could be that our notes are faulty,” Mingi reminds the older, though his eyes flew back to San soon after, “but yes. Don’t you worry, San. I’m sure Yeosang is as shocked as you are when he noticed you’re a spirit, much like himself.”

“You think he noticed?” San questions, and Yunho hid his face behind both his hands. That looks like a habit, so San took note of it. Mingi looks disappointed, though not vehemently and more annoyed, but playfully. “Really, Yunho? You’d think it’s about time you come clean. You even brought him home.”

“Yeosang saw you first,” Yunho wheezes out in between his laughter. So he was laughing, huh. “Where?” San questions, head spinning too much from all the things he needed to ask that day. “The foot of your mountain, San. He told me before we got up on our way that it felt weird to him, that mountain. Kind of familiar, yet kind of intimidating. And since we came to your mountain because Yeosang has had an agenda for himself, you know, to find his friend I told you about--we were dubbed those quote on quote rebels. No other reason except the fact that he hates colonizers and he’d do anything to mess with their schedule. Uh, colonizers are. . . you know. Powerful people. Like the ones you met in the barracks. The one who shot you.”

“Yeah,” Mingi chimes in. “He met you when he was about to wreak chaos in one particular camping site--since he’s heard they were about to hunt for warhorses--but he came rushing to us flushed and thrilled instead, said he found a mountain spirit.”

“I didn’t feel him,” San argues, yet found a flaw in his argument almost immediately. 

“You probably did, you were just overwhelmed. If it was your first time meeting a human and you didn’t even know others like you exist--you’d miss him in a heartbeat,” Yunho pats San’s shoulder. It was supposed to be considerate, but it weighed on San’s mind even more. “Yeosang’s weaker than most. That’s what he keeps saying. About his existence, his sound, his blessed abilities, and his physiques. Compared to you, in your domain, and the things you’re able to do even when you’re miles away from your mountain--it makes sense that Yeosang doesn’t feel as a disturbance when there are dozens of other humans around.”

“So he wanted us to find you. Begged Yunho to do it for days, even,” Mingi supplies, “he thinks you might know what to do. He’s lost a friend, you see.”

“He knows,” Yunho reminds Mingi--who wasn’t there for the previous conversation. “I’ve told him.”

“Ah, yeah,” Mingi huffs, playing with the strings of his undone sleeves. “Well, but then we grow to realize as we are stalking you, you are looking after someone.”

“Who is in a fucking concentration camp,” Yunho deadpanned, sounding as if it’s the most dangerous plan he has ever heard. San slightly agreed, but quietly. He doesn’t ever want to get shot like that. No more. It hurted a little too much and he had to stop himself from whimpering the entire night while he heals. 

“Yeosang took back everything he begged us to do when he sees that you also have your own things to cater for, and decided that it was too dangerous for us to follow you around for too long--but when we started packing our bags to leave, there are soldiers who caught wind of our existence and thought that we were the people who left survivors on their front door.”

“Well, yes, but I made them catch me instead,” San mumbles, his words muffled by his hand over his mouth, a clear sign of stressing out. He doesn’t even know he can stress this much. “And as much as I thank you for it, since it allowed Mingi and Yeosang to escape--I did  _ not  _ enjoy having to see you get shot and heal yourself the entire night,” Yunho states, and San made an effort to look shy. He was kind of embarrassed, it wasn’t a lie.

“I really just didn’t want your pretty friend to get caught, you see. I’ve seen other people get buried alive by these people--it’s not like I planned to get shot, it was a spur of the moment thing,” San huffs, wiping his palm on his soft trousers.

Mingi is cackling, at this point, since Yunho looks understandably mad. He would too, if he puts his life on the line to get inside a concentration camp to save a mountain spirit and see the deity get shot in front of his naked human eyes, not knowing if he’s next or if the murderers are taking a break for the day. . . after killing a whole  _ spirit.  _ Well, ‘killing’. San didn’t die.

“I really thought I was done for, San!”

“Yes,” San responds, once again a beat too quick. “I know. I heard how heart-wrenching your tears were. Must’ve been scary, huh.”

If the emotions ‘theory’ was right, and it lined up perfectly with his mental state--did it explain why San taunted the Commander the night before? To shoot him? 

Because that was completely out of character for him to do.

He’d argue that it was half because he’s driven to a corner from what he sees in Kim Hongjoong’s memories; and he was drawn to save that young man because, well, he felt the need to. But the other half could be because of two things he wasn’t really sure of. On one side, the negative emotions theory has been _ kind of  _ making logical sense, if he follows the completely illogical existence that spirits are. That he himself is. On the other side, San has experienced being mad because he himself was offended. 

By that old man he smashed with a tree. 

Was his taunting caused by him being tied to a makeshift pole like a useless bag of flour and stepped on with heavy platform shoes all day before he was finally kicked, or was it because he was backed by the rest of the victim’s negative emotions. Kim Hongjoong had a lot of friends there, all scrawny and seemingly unfed. Maybe he needed more situations to finally come to a conclusion. But who would make him mad enough around here? 

Should he leave already?

Yunho is looking at the setting sun at this point, and Mingi turned an oil lamp on. “San,” he beckons the mountain spirit over, “do you usually eat dinner?”

“No,” San shakes his head, looking at the nomadic village below them, where a few lanterns are lit around something akin to a carnival ground. Not as majestic as the drawings of rituals he’s been seeing on their paper documents, but close enough. 

He spots Yeosang walking here and there, with the amount of tables it would need twelve men to lift on his left hand while his right hand, gloved, is holding onto a little girl’s hand. He says something to the little girl before she runs off to meet someone else, and San’s eyes are back on Yeosang.

Despite not being able to do much nature-bending as a travelling spirit, his superhuman physiques are still helpful for this tiny homey village. What  _ does  _ a travelling spirit do? Teleport? Perhaps. 

Maybe that’s why San didn’t even realize his existence.

“Yeosang barely eats, either,” Mingi says, closing all the documents into a tiny bundle bag. “Only sometimes, when apple trees offer him their fruits.”

“Ah,” San nods, though he doesn’t understand. Maybe he doesn’t have the same natural relations San has with his plant-friends, though, who is he to judge which one is right?

“Would you join us for dinner?”

_ ((Fun fact 3: Yeosang being a travelling spirit is questionable. Hint: his name’s second character.)) _

\---

Dinner, San noted, was far more pleasant than sleeping at night. Inside tents. All alone. He was given a new tent to rest after the villagers exchanged pleasant conversations with him throughout dinner, making him forget that they’re essentially eating mostly animals and plants. Whatever, they weren’t actively torturing it--it was a cycle of life.

But the sleeping part he could never understand. To sleep? While the world buzzes with so much life?

San opens the sides of the tent which leads him to the breathable air outside, noticing how the temperature has dropped to a whole new degree of coldness. It was refreshing, but possibly too cold for most of them. Granted, the humans were seen shivering. There are quite plenty of them surrounding a fireplace a few feet away from his tent, though to his luck; none of them glanced his way. They were boiling something in a cauldron hung by the fire, and their stiff fingers were too busy clenching on their bowls to notice his movements. 

“You’re glowing,” someone said from behind him, and San turns around to find Yeosang standing there, his white horse friend never absent. The horse’s soul whirs pleasantly when San laid his eyes on him, so the mountain spirit acknowledged him with a nod. 

“I am,” San returns to look at the people, who are now mostly standing to scoop into the boiling cauldron. “They don’t know yet. Careful if they see you. They’d want to pray to you non-stop,” Yeosang says again, voice still as lackluster of emotions as the first time he spoke to San. This, however, weirdly attracted San to look at him again, now a bit more carefully. 

Yeosang’s hair was braided in the morning, but now he lets it loose. It was as long as his shoulder, even longer than San’s unkempt one, but Yeosang’s hair looked a lot more manageable. It was silky-looking, and it flowed easily unlike his entire tense being. Maybe he was just tense around San. 

Not even the humans he’s encountered looks that intimidated. Has he done something wrong to this one?

San squints his eyes at the pale and fair face of the travelling spirit. Was the horse a part of him? Is that why he was called a travelling spirit? Because he’s just like any other, but doesn’t have a territory? 

“Usually, no one sees me,” San threw the other spirit a smile before he kneels, facing the rest of the nomadic village. He can bring the temperature up a little bit--though telling the wind what to do is beyond him. The ground can heat up a little bit for him, can’t they? He’s done it a few times back at home, but maybe that’s because the domain was his. Won’t hurt to try, though.

Yeosang is watching each movement he makes from behind the mountain spirit in muted awe. He’s never seen someone that strong, though he can’t really say a lot about strength. Both himself and his only other spirit friend aren’t blessed with physical domains. At least Wooyoung had one. Strong bonds were where he thrived. Yeosang himself, however? 

He looks down at the ground as he notices how the ground warmed up a little bit, and then he’s back to looking at San’s back as the mountain spirit turns around. 

San scratches at his head.

“That’s the most I can do for your people,” he says, looking ashamed. Yeosang frowned at the misconception. “They’re not my people, glowing spirit.”

“I’m- I’m a mountain spirit,” San responds, trying to shake off the embarrassment of his initial shock of Yeosang admitting the fact that he knows San is a spirit. 

“Oh,” Yeosang huffs, nodding slowly. “We know nothing about each other, then.”

“Unfortunately.”

They stood there in silence, looking at each other. San doesn’t know if Yeosang overthinks whenever he sees another spirit around his habitual territory, but San overthinks whenever he sees any other spirit in general--much less someone this. . . pretty. So from the outside looking in, it might look like these two very powerful deities are sizing up each other, but in reality, something in the back of their heads clicked at about the same time after zoning out for half an hour or so. 

_ Have I been looking for too long? _

“Can’t sleep, huh?” Yeosang asks San, outstretching his right hand for the mountain spirit to take. “Would you mind going somewhere with me?”

This was a mindblowing invitation. Reasons being: Yeosang is gorgeous to San and he’s asking San to follow him somewhere, and this familiar position. San wonders how it feels to touch someone without feeling pain. The pain he almost constantly feels while he dragged Kim Hongjoong and his remaining survivor friends all the way to the place he’s seen from their memories, no glove or extra fabric to cover him from the onslaught of emotions. Can touching be just what it was meant to be? Simply two beings coexisting in a time and place close enough for them to collide in the middle? 

“Don’t worry, San,” Yeosang assures him, “we won’t hurt each other. As of now.”

To hear something somewhat reassuring from someone who looks as divine as Yeosang attracted him closer and closer to the other spirit, technically and literally speaking, since he reaches out immediately to accept the outstretched hand in a heartbeat. 

Yeosang took his time after, looking down on their conjoined hands before wrapping his finger around San’s--much less graceful and dainty--palm before he pulled him in. 

“Get on,” Yeosang signalled with a head tilt towards his white horse friend, who is a tad bit taller than most horses San has ever seen. 

“Will I know where we’ll be going?”

“Hm,” Yeosang hums while he assesses the question. “Technically, no. But you will have a clue once you’ve seen it.”

“Ah,” San nods, “there’s a deeper layer to it for you, doesn’t it, Yeosang?”

San was caught off guard when Yeosang mounted the horse in front of him with a muted smile, which is still apparent on the corner of his lips. Moreover, when the travelling spirit pulls both of San’s hands with his own to put them around his torso. San almost voiced his concern over how small the figure underneath his palm felt. 

“There’s always a deeper layer to everything, San.”

That wasn’t wrong for him to say. Especially for someone who has seen more than San--which, the logical explanation for his own age is still up in the air at the moment, but he’s never felt half the pain Yeosang has, probably. Which was questionable on a personal level. If he’s been hurt before, shouldn’t the touch of his skin hurt San in return? Unless that wasn’t the case.

What the humans know was not entirely the truth.

It’s way darker out here, San realizes as they left the fiery light source the nomadic village provided. It exposed more stars, twinkling here and there as if they weren’t meant to be seen by the tired naked eyes of their audience. San felt bad for looking. He’s sure the stars aren’t meant for creatures like  _ them  _ to enjoy. 

“I pretend to sleep sometimes,” Yeosang says, looking up at the sky. San notices the way he’s leaning towards San’s hands a little further, as if testing the waters for how sturdy of a support the mountain spirit’s hands are. Yeosang is still holding on to the mane of his white horse friend, the rest of its untouched mane swaying here and there. But Yeosang is right in front of San, and his unbraided locks are also obviously affected by the blowing wind typically experienced while horseback riding--and San is just so. . . distracted. 

“But what for?” San croaks out, almost forgetting to answer. He knows he could’ve just touched Yeosang and let him know the words he was thinking. That way he doesn’t even need to voice out a noise, or rack his brain for the right human-based words. But San has a feeling both he and Yeosang have no intention of letting that happen. It would’ve simply ruined the atmosphere. 

Yeosang lifts his shoulders absentmindedly, and San notices how much less guarded he looks. Especially, how much more divine the other spirit felt before him. Maybe it was the tense looks from Yeosang which got him worried--or maybe Yeosang was worried because he looked at him weird. Who knows, at this point, since it all felt irrelevant when compared to the cathartic sensation he has right now.

“I don’t know,” and the lift of Yeosang’s shoulders made his long, flowy hair float around even more. “Maybe I just want to fit in.”

San reached over before he could stop his hands, feeling how a part of Yeosang’s bi-coloured locks smoothened themselves around his palm before slipping away, bouncing to the rhythm of the galloping. It felt like the flow of water, no. It felt like how the flow of water  _ sounds  _ like. 

“Huh, that’s funny,” San chortled, now being the absentminded one in this exchange, “I’ve always wanted to fit in too. It’s lonely existing all by myself.”

Yeosang doesn’t respond to it, and San didn’t pick up on the conversation anymore. A few more of these exchanges happened, only for them to fall into a mutual agreement over most of those, only to ponder to themselves more what it could even mean. 

The sea, however.

They didn’t depart from the top of Yeosang’s white horse. Which left them in only a few close-ranged positions left for a conversation to even flow. Upon all of those possibilities, San knew, somehow, that Yeosang would stay facing forward--as he is right now, mindlessly beckoning San to inch closer and closer so he could listen to what Yeosang is going to say.

They both know damn well spirits have a hearing good enough for San not to, yet he did. He did everything Yeosang asked him to. 

For some reason.

“I hate the sea,” Yeosang whispers, his head hung down and shoulders dejected. San has to disagree, but there’s no harm in hating the sea. He lets a couple of seconds past before responding, however. “Then why are we here?”

Yeosang, as if offended--San knows he isn’t, however, since being offended isn’t really within the neutral realms of a spirit’s only emotional value--lifts his chin up to gaze at the crashing waves below them, washing up on a half-drowning rock a few feet away from the beach. “Because the beach is not the sea,” he says lightly, as if it explained everything. It most definitely doesn’t. Maybe it does, but San’s a self-certified fool at some points.

“It’s similar,” Yeosang starts again, “but I know I’d go through different experiences if I were to stay on the beach, rather than diving straight to the sea.”

“Not even diving-” he continues, “drowning.”

San, who has never heard him talk that much at once, is in awe. He knows he needs to be actively looking for the deeper meaning behind these words Yeosang is voicing out, but at the same time--San has only ever seen himself. In water reflections, little puddles, weird ponds inside his mountain’s numerous caves--all of those looks of his, his little quirks and signatures have been so different compared to Yeosang. A spirit who looks like that. . . how? Who? 

“Why must you keep looking at me like that?” Yeosang turns his upper torso around to face San, his voice and expression both showing how confrontational he’s willing to get. “Like what?”

“Like you’ve never seen anyone like me.”   
San almost laughs. Almost. “Because I haven’t, Yeosang. Is that so hard to believe?” San confirms, and gets an immediate whiplash from how Yeosang is the one laughing instead. The travelling spirit is shaking his head, playing with the tips of his frayed sleeves. 

“I’ve never met anyone like you, either,” Yeosang turns back around, and San is worried for his spine’s comfort. Sure, he’s a divine creature, but his human body is concerningly frail-looking. “The fact that you’re a mountain spirit just. . . fits. I don’t know. You’re mountain-looking.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” San’s eyebrows shot up, something he habitually does whenever he’s confused. No one’s ever told him, though, since no one’s ever seen the mountain spirit, much less when he’s confused. Neither Moro nor Washi would ever care about how his facial structure moves. They’re just there to protect him. 

“In a good way,” Yeosang flails an arm at him, jumping off the tall white horse, “I meant as in, you’re strong-looking.”

San is still half-confused. 

“Looking strong is good in any way? I got shot because of it,” he scratches the side of his arms, missing the way Yeosang’s head whipped back at him to look. Yeosang was about to offer him help on getting down, but then he heard what San said and he’s inner and outwardly panicking. “Shot?” Yeosang half-screeches. 

It was a new type of noise from Yeosang, which should’ve got San kind of amazed, but he was still thinking about how looking strong is beneficial in any way. 

“Huh? Oh yeah, in the place I met Yunho in. He just said it, though? Oh wait, he said that to Mingi.”

“Shot where- like at the arm?” Yeosang pulls him down the horse by force--which in hindsight, he himself has no idea why he’d do that to a presumably wounded spirit, even though they’re supposedly stronger than humans. San looks at him weird when Yeosang made him sit down on the ground like a commonly known worried mother hen. “No,” San giggles,  _ absolutely  _ enjoying the attention. “Through the heart.”

Yeosang was in the middle of fixing his overgrown bangs to look for the signs of scars, apparently, as San said it--and he just froze, left hand at the side of his ear and his right hand reaching forward. “Through- th- with a what?”

“A gun,” San continues, still smiling. The worry on Yeosang’s face was exhilarating to him. He looks cute, admittedly, and it feels warm inside to have someone worry over something as insignificant as yesterday’s scar. Okay, not insignificant. San did die for ten whole minutes, but that's--besides the case.

“And you stayed alive?”

“No, Yeosang, I died.”

This sent Yeosang falling to his knees, something that sent San to both shock and to the end of his smiling session. “What, what is it?”

“Is it?” Yeosang spoke to himself, burying his fingers in the sand. For a minute, San thought he was going to do something around him, but the thought left as soon as it came as Yeosang continued rambling to himself about something and  _ everything.  _ “It’s why I feel like I need to keep looking for you. You  _ died?  _ Huh- but wait. Spirits don’t affect other spirits. We also don’t know if the word die is accurate. It can’t be because of that, then. My feelings are my own accord. But can I even feel- can we? Can we, San?” he looks up to meet the mountain spirit’s eyes, and for a moment, San is thrown into a loop.

Yeosang is confused.

So is San, but there’s a different type of confusion here--something San failed to see every passing moment beforehand. 

Codependency. 

It’s a scary thing, San must admit--especially after seeing the side effects change someone entirely, right in front of him. It’s not that deep yet between San and Yeosang, no. They’ve talked, but only that day. Yeosang saw him and was intimidated, and San saw Yeosang and felt like he was pretty--but that’s it. But that doesn’t take away from Yeosang’s codependency trauma, not even a little bit. 

Or was it something else? Self-guilt, maybe?

San couldn’t imagine the fear and confusion one must feel when they lose someone they’ve spent most of their sentient lives with, especially creatures as confused and weirdly based as spirits are. San is confused with his entire life for being someone who has always been alone, yet after seeing how having a company affects Yeosang, he might start thinking about how lucky he is to never have anyone in the first place so he’d not be traumatized when they leave. Without a word, most of all. 

But then again, San thinks as he reaches forward to look into Yeosang’s eyes, wishing he could express even half of the understanding he has on the other spirit’s destitution--he knows it wasn’t that easy for Yeosang, and it’d be uneasy for him too, if only he was on Yeosang’s shoes. 

So the answer to Yeosang’s question was definite.

“I’m sorry,” San huffs out his shaky breath as he leans forward to engulf Yeosang in a hug he hopes to be warmer than the one he gave Yunho. It stings, and that shocked San enough to almost pull away completely. Yet he doesn’t. “I’m sorry,” he says again, while pulling Yeosang in.

“I don’t know.”

Consoling a weeping spirit he didn’t even know was able to weep was definitely not on San’s earlier life plans, obviously, but now that he’s here, he wasn’t really planning on letting go of the other spirit’s shoulder. 

He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t understand what made the other cry, he’s startled with how much the negative emotions hurt, and he barely knows anything about himself. But he’s willing to try. 

And he genuinely thinks it’s all that matters.

Spirits don’t really sleep, but Yeosang returns home with his eyes closed the entire way, almost reminiscent of a human who sleeps in a slumber deep enough to not be awoken by the movement of a horse slowly galloping back home. His head was supported by San’s back the entire way, and the mountain spirit took this time to appreciate the fact that he can communicate with horses well enough--despite the fact that this horse is technically a spirit nonetheless. Yeosang’s spirit horse, maybe. He doesn’t really know the logistics.

San hasn’t ever felt this tired in his entire spirit-life. 

And here he thought reviving himself from a heart that doesn’t beat is tiring. Consoling the crying travelling spirit by hugging him and bearing all the shocking negative emotions are by far, the hardest thing San has ever done. Not to mention how he tried stopping himself from conveying any negative thoughts, too, in fear of hurting Yeosang. It seems as if he doesn’t, however, since the other is still clinging onto him despite how many hours it seems to pass them since he started weeping. The crying stopped, at one point, and Yeosang automatically hid his face behind San’s back.

Was it shame he was experiencing? 

The stings San has been experiencing were lessening the closer they are to the nomadic village and the more the sun comes out of the valley like a peeking ball of orange. At one point, Yeosang stopped crushing his face onto the surface of San’s back, too, and settled more on digging his chin into the mountain spirit’s shoulder. San voices no complaint, but he was positively drained. 

“I’m sorry,” Yeosang voices out, and the prickling stings stopped almost immediately. San frowns as if the lack of pain wasn’t liberating. “I know that was tiring. It must be. Sorry.” 

“It’s no big deal, Yeosang,” San waves the concern off, but Yeosang’s head on his shoulder felt doubtful. “I wanted to be the help I’ve never had.”

“Wise words from someone who’s been gritting his teeth for about four hours straight,” Yeosang chuckles, and San gets slightly more loopy from how gorgeous he sounds. No, it’s because he’s drained. None of that was caused from the angelic laughter, no, not at all. 

“You probably rubbed off on me, big-words-spirit. I’ve never been that good at reassuring anyone before,” San leans back on Yeosang with a shove, and the latter rolls his eyes harmlessly. It feels harmless both times he’s seen it done, yet San still doesn’t have a clue on what the gesture really is for. “How would I even rub off on you? All I did was cry all night.”

“Well, you were also touching me all night,” San added, and Yeosang had nothing to say. For a second, he agreed. 

“Hey, it doesn’t work like that unless I  _ let  _ you in my memories,  _ san yu-ryeong,  _ don’t take me for a fool,” was what Yeosang said when he finally grasps his own educational value of himself. Or more so about what he knows.

“Eh, I don’t know,” San shrugs, a coy smile adorning his lips. He feels drunk at this point, both drained and recharged in the same exact time. “You let me in quite easily, I personally think.”

Yeosang’s entire upper torso shook at this, and San was worried for a moment before he felt really pleasant from the chortling laughter. 

“I really did, didn't I?” the travelling spirit hums, and sue San for feeling like Yeosang’s arms are tightening around him. It wasn’t just a feeling, was it? No, he’s sure it wasn’t.

“It’s kinda scary how easy I did, when you think about it.”

“I’d advise you to not think about it,” San chided, making Yeosang’s laugh echo a little longer like the repeating crash of waves to shore, “but I know all we can do is think about things, so. Don’t be sorry about it.”

And then San shoots himself awake with his own thoughts. Ironically. 

“Since you’re a travelling spirit and we’re kind of travelling right now, are you in your domain at the moment?” he asks, and Yeosang’s head tilted to the side in a criminally wholesome manner. “What do you mean?”

“You’re a travelling spirit, right?”

The silence was the next scariest thing San has ever undergone. “Who told you that?” Yeosang questions, an attentive poise adorning his figure. “Well, Yunho and Mingi. I guess,” San says carefully, unsure if he should throw the two humans under the bus.

“Oh, well,” Yeosang chuckles heartily, though some tone of it was laced yet again with anxiety. It didn’t spike any pain in any way, however, and his grip around San hadn’t loosened up, so it must be. . .

“Wooyoung lied to them about it. Oh- Wooyoung is. . . my friend. So he lied about me. And about himself. I never thought they’d still remember specifically what the lies were about.”

It’s now San’s turn to look at Yeosang with a confused, attentive look.

“Can I get. . . an explanation, or-”

“Sure? It really isn’t as interesting as all the lies we’ve kept, however,” Yeosang rubs his nose casually. Well, seemingly casual. He’s nervous about something. 

He starts off with an uncomfortable grin.

“Wooyoung’s not a spirit,” Yeosang sighs, looking off into the distance. “He’s a ghost.”

“A ghost is a human’s soul remnant. So Wooyoung was once a young man. He died from something, he keeps telling me he remembered why he died but he won’t talk about it. He said the sickness was too embarrassing to die from. I then realized that he drowned himself. At the sea. No particular reason I actually know about, since I never asked. I didn’t feel the anxiety push to figure it out. I thought I’d have him forever, anyways.”

“So he’s not a friendship spirit?” San questions, and Yeosang shakes his head vehemently. “No,” Yeosang chuckles wholeheartedly, though his eyes look empty, “he’s not even friendly enough to be a ‘friendly’ spirit. Much less a friendship one.”

San can see where this is going.

“My lie, the one that he made for me--was because he wanted to save Yunho, who was at the time attempting. . . to end his life. Wooyoung said he appears in Yunho’s life because there’s going to be a friendship bond so strong in the future and he’ll lead Yunho to meet him. ‘Don’t do it,’ Wooyoung told Yunho, ‘you’d leave your bestest best friend all alone in the world. And you haven’t even met him yet!’”

“But it was odd to see two spirits together, at least according to Yunho, so Wooyoung told the boy that I’m a travelling spirit who travels places with my white horse. I told him it was a foolish attempt of covering lies with more lies, but he won’t listen to me.”

“Why was it foolish, Yeosang?” San blinks slowly, assessing all the information he’s got. 

“Wooyoung and I had a deadline,” Yeosang replies, not looking at San, “I was to accompany him so he’d not be lonely as long as his family’s mourning period exist--since they prayed so hard so Wooyoung wouldn’t be lonely anymore in the afterlife, but after that period expires, I was to bring him somewhere to let his soul rest. If not, he was not going to have any chances of. . . resting easy. Well, that’s what some gods told me.”

“A day after the deadline expired, I tried to get Wooyoung to the place we were expected to go. He agreed only with the promise of me taking care of Yunho until the day I may no longer breathe--but on the way we crossed paths with a nomadic villager’s family who were lost and were waiting for their friends to come by. Wooyoung insisted we wait with them and pointed the family to Yunho. He told me he’d return to my side after he led them, but however long I waited, he didn't come back to me. I returned to the cave Yunho was in for good measures, he wasn’t there. I spied on Yunho’s new village, he wasn’t there either.”

San has never faced human’s soul remnants, nor will he ever, he thinks--since he’s not Yeosang, but. . .

“What are you, then, if not a travelling spirit?”

Yeosang smiles at San, who is still looking up at him. It was probably bitter--the smile; but it’s also there because San takes all of this in such a comfortable, unbothered stride. 

“I’m a mourning spirit, San.”

“Ah,” San reacts in the same way he did yesterday, when Yeosang told him about life and layers. The air of familiarity is comfortable to Yeosang, and he chuckles yet again. “That’s not an ideal way of taking this information in, you know?”

“Why? Because you feel unwarrantedly guilty for a human’s life choice?”

“I think it’s warranted,” Yeosang ponders, and San pulls a weird face. “Come on, San, I was basically responsible for him.”

“Yeah, accompanying him and giving him the choice to let his soul rest,” San argues. “But he was still a liv- well, not living. He was still allowed to give consent on where he wants his soul to end up. Who knows, maybe Wooyoung is having fun haunting his bullies right now, or something.”

“Aren’t you worried that I’m only clinging like this to you because you almost died?” Yeosang asks, an amused smile decorating his face. 

“Hah,” San chuckled bitterly, “I guess crying for an entire night over something really lifts the burden off of a creature, no matter what they are. You’re already able to make jokes about your own insecurities after weeping as if the world is about to end--I think you’re well enough without me. But!”

“But what?”

“If a mourning spirit who looks like you comes by to accompany me every time I’m almost dead then maybe I’d die a few more times-”

“San,” Yeosang chided him by nudging the bridge of his nose. Not as lightly as he planned. “Don’t do that. I don’t even know  _ how  _ you survived a bullet right through your heart. Did you know I was hurt once over slipping down a ladder and it took me as long as a human’s healing phase to fully heal?”

“Are you saying it’s a once in a lifetime thing that I could heal myself in less than a day?” San grins.

“Maybe. It’s probably because Yunho was praying really hard on your name and no one could pray by my real name because they think I’m the wrong spiri-”

“Does that mean  _ you’re  _ a once in a lifetime opportunity?” San grins even wider, and the reflection of himself through Yeosang’s lens was. . . cheshire-like. 

Yet the calm before the storm really does bring a big storm. Though we, deities and humans alike--usually learn both of those things too late. 

“Hold on,” San shifts on his seat enough for Yeosang to release the grip he’s had on him, only to jump off the tall white horse. The second San’s feet hits the ground, he knows. And at this point, Yeosang knows, too.

“No,” Yeosang looks up at the remnants of the nomadic village. “Jeong Yunho!”

Yeosang giddied up on his horse as a knee jerk reaction, only realizing a beat too late that San had dismounted a few moments ago. When he looked back, however, there’s a big hole left on the ground where San was, leading to a tunnel--and Yeosang took it as a gesture to race the mountain spirit before the entirety of the nomadic village was slaughtered. 

On the other hand, San is erupting out of the ground around where he remembered his tent was at. Subconsciously, he emerged right underneath a very distressed Mingi who was shoving several food and papers into a bag. “Mingi?” San calls out, climbing out the tunnel he’s left behind only to spook Mingi so much he fell on his butt. 

“Fuck- how- San?!” the human man helps him crawl out with one of his hands, multifunctional while he still uses the other hand for panicked packing. “I thought you left with Yeosang, or something! Yunho was so glad you two weren’t around the premises, why’d you come back?!”

San stared at Mingi as if the human had grown two heads.

“You were. Attacked. What do you  _ mean  _ why’d we come back- give me that bag, we’re getting out of here,” San looks around at Mingi’s little wooden chamber trying to make sense of what he’s supposed to be taking. “Did you say we? Yeosang is back here? With his horse?”

“Sure,” San nods, filling his hands with Mingi’s dried fruit stock. 

“You two should use it and  _ run  _ then, San. Neither of you are spirits who are fruits of human’s needs. Don’t put our well-being in front of your responsibilities. What would the order of the world be if me and Yunho took two spirits for granted? Don’t you think the gods would wreak havoc once they know?”

Good question, San ponders, kicking the door down before pulling a blanket off of Mingi’s tiny bedsheets and throwing them on top of the taller human.

“I don’t know, Mingi, but frankly speaking,” he pulls Mingi closer, looking here and there for signs of other gun-using humans. Mingi’s figure seems as if he’s waiting for San to continue his sentence, even underneath the blanket, so San gave him what he wanted. 

“I don’t think my creators give any fucks about  _ where  _ I assert my dominance.”

The second they leap out of the door, there were bullets raining after them, some a lot bigger than the ones San is accustomed to--via putting a hole through him--so the mountain spirit picks Mingi up to throw him across the road while he does the same thing he did when he saved Kim Hongjoong and his friends. In hindsight, San should’ve known throwing Mingi was a bad idea to begin with, even if the human lands with a perfect stance--only tipping to a fall a few seconds after his landing, tripping over the fabric of his outer blanket layer, the one San puts on him.

“What are you doing?!” San heard the muffled voice coming from Mingi, still struggling with his blankets and how to navigate his movements underneath it, but the question was left unanswered while Mingi frantically tried his best to get out of his predicament. Not because San doesn’t want to answer. Technically speaking, he himself has yet to name this particular move. This ability, if you would be so kind as to call it that. 

The moment San’s feet came in contact with the ground, the highland’s cliffs started shaking. The only difference was since they’re on a significantly higher land--unlike the even ground of the concentration camp’s fields where San has done the same thing--the earth’s movement felt a lot harsher than the previous one he’d released. Mingi, as the only audience who appeared to understand that San is a mountain spirit, heard a crack somewhere on the ground while the earth moved. It appeared to be a wake up call strong enough for him to want to stop San, even though he knows a little too well how their life would be on the line if the earthquake stops. He crawls out of his little blanket covers to drag himself little by little upon his elbow until he reaches San’s ankles.

“San, no!” Mingi exclaimed, getting the attention he needed from the mountain spirit. 

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” San pulls Mingi up with one of his unused hands, assuming the man was talking about hurting the soldiers who were just recently raiding their village. “You want the people who have torn your home apart - to get away?”

Mingi cringed at San’s question, especially how the voice was laced in disbelief. Well, no, Mingi thought to himself, a little selfishly, since inflicting pain upon people who gave him the same amount of pain was not the beliefs of his people--but he understands the curiosity in San’s voice. The mountain spirit has been living by himself his entire life, probably. Had to defend his territory by himself, too. 

“Yes,” Mingi replies, his voice breaking at their edges. San absolutely stops the earthquake, at this point, turning around to look at Mingi. 

The man recognized the look flickering on San’s eyes.  _ Why?  _ He would’ve asked. But the fact that San isn’t opening his mouth to ask at all should be concerning to Mingi. It didn’t, however, and all Mingi did was smile at the mountain spirit. “Because, San,” he says, in a tone of voice San has never heard from humans before. What is this emotion called, he wonders as Mingi continues.

“In this world, some wars aren’t meant to be won,” he concludes, eyebrows furrowed while his eyes divert themselves from returning the look San is intently giving him. Mingi scratches the back of his neck, unsure if he relayed the message as charismatically as his father once did to him and his brothers. “We should still. . . run, maybe. Since they- they have guns, and guns have bullets inside them?” Mingi chuckles from how awkward the situation was with San looking at him, empty headed and Mingi himself, too engrossed in his own insecurities to continue speaking.

While Mingi refers to the--mostly defeated, some still groaning and whimpering from the impact of San’s short-lived earthquake session--soldiers behind them, his eyes caught the slick and almost unrecognizable movement of one of the soldiers. If not for the fact that Mingi would rather look anywhere else aside from San’s face from shame at that moment, he would’ve missed it and both Yunho and himself would have to share the same trauma.  _ Of the mountain spirit being shot in front of them and they can do nothing about it.  _

But Mingi  _ saw  _ the sneaky broken-legged soldier’s movement, and in a split second, his body moved on his own accord.

Ironic, since he just preached about not winning wars all the time as if he’s a pacifist--but Mingi tries to not think about it. His father told him too, that those words won’t make you an angel, hence.

There’s this traditionally made weapon Mingi always carries around in his backpack--the bag was once a satchel but Yeosang has a backpack when he first came by and Mingi found his own ways to turn his satchel into somewhat an easier-made backpack--which was given to him by his late grandmother, the sweetest and most dangerous woman Mingi has ever crossed paths with. Her attitude of not letting anyone walk all over her though she was a single mother was backed up by her trusty generational weapon, and she felt like it was her task given by the gods and spirits to teach Mingi how to wield it--since he was her favourite grandson.

So she did. And he mastered it, despite never having the right place to store a cleaver since the older Mingi grows in the village, the more the elders hyper-focused on being generally ruled by the sought for peace. So he does what a Song Mingi does best: carry it around in his old leather backpack.

And it’s about to come in handy.

Literally.

Wordlessly, Mingi shoves San out of the way, chanting prayers to the gods upon shoving a literal spirit out of his way--but it’s to save his life, Mingi is sure the gods would forgive him. The soldier was a heartbeat too late compared to Mingi’s movements, however, and had only realized that a young man wielding a carved cleaver was in front of him a bit after he looked down on his gun, now on the floor, and his hand still attached around it. Around the gun. 

His hand was no longer attached to his body--and only after the realization does the pain hit for this poor man.

Mingi flinches away when he feels San’s shadow towering over him, only to look over his shoulder when he notices the spirit’s leg kick someone away from jumping him from the back while he was focused on slashing someone’s arm entirely off. 

San pulls Mingi on his feet the second time that day, just in time as the pooling blood underneath the soldier’s decapitated arm reaches Mingi’s previously pristine skin-coloured pants. “You’re right,” San states, seemingly out of breath, “maybe we should just run.”

“Where?” 

Mingi didn’t even deliver his question perfectly before San pulled him by the hand in a speedy sprint. There was only a split second of panic that Mingi was allowed to experience when he saw the cliff approaching, but the shock only registered as the ground was no longer beneath them and the two runaways were pulled by the gravity force onto the raging river down below. 

San held Mingi as close as possible, which spiked panic all over the human since he wasn’t about to let the mountain spirit touch him solely for his own stupid fragile body--but Mingi’s lungs wasn’t capable of arguing mid-air and San was a few thousand more man power when compared to his feeble attempt to wring himself out, so Mingi’s head was majorly protected by the mountain spirit’s arms  _ and  _ upper torso as they come in contact with the water’s surface.

San genuinely thought it would be the end of his heartbeat spiking up every two seconds when they get into the river--especially with him being affected a great deal since Mingi isn’t exactly calm, which is understandable. But he underestimated the stream of the river greatly.

He heard Mingi curse by his left, a few feet behind him though San was a hundred percent sure he held the man close enough to him as they clashed into the raging river. But a few mere seconds after that, only while they resurface from almost drowning--Mingi has already been forced away from his hands and was limply floating a few metres away from San. 

But there’s no way either of them would give up that easy.

San swims  _ backwards,  _ against the tide, something he knew was impossible from previous accounts. But it wasn’t impossible. He knows this--since he’s inhuman. There’s little to nothing he knows, but at least he knows that much. So shouldn’t he be able to swim against a simple tide? Shouldn’t he? 

Mingi was flopped here and there, and at one point he was even thrown onto his face. San panicked at this, shouting for Mingi as if the man has super-hearing. San couldn’t even hear his own voice, overpowered but the loud slapping of water against each other and the rocks on each side of the-

That’s it!

The fallen rocks from the cliff’s annual landslides shaped a large enough path for them to walk on without slipping every five seconds--and Mingi could even rest for a while in an ideally comfortable position while they catch their breath. San only needs to find somewhere he could latch his hand on, and then he can catch Mingi, and then-

His back was forcefully slammed on a large rock, a smooth looking one which reflected the sunlight from its tips that is still decorated in remnants of the river’s tide washing up against it. It hurts quite much, but not much so he was rendered helpless. San took Mingi’s flailing hands when the man finally reached him and with all his might, pulled him to the pathway formed by rocks on the side of the river. 

“Fuck this fucking day,” Mingi wheezes, coughs out water in a slew of depressed cursing chains. San almost laughed before remembering how painful it was to be in contact with Mingi’s skin, pulling his arm away as if the man’s back personally offended him. Well it did sting.

Mingi snaps out of his self-hating mind dome to look at San, scanning him shortly. 

“Holy shit, are you okay? I thought we were done for when you pulled us off that cliff,” Mingi wipes the corners of his mouth generously. San wonders why, since both Mingi’s hands and sleeves are wet, and his face is also wet--which means the wiping did nothing sort of useful, but he digressed. “I’m fine, Mingi. Are you-”

San never finished his sentence. 

There’s someone here. Someone around. He feels it on his soles, tickling. They’re lighting fire up. For what, he isn’t too sure yet. There’s only one, though. No, two. It’s talking to someone. But he can’t feel the other’s presence. Could it be?

“Where’s Yunho?” San asks, and Mingi actually took time out of his episode of cleansing water out of his lungs to look around. “That’s the thing,” Mingi wipes the corners of his mouth yet again. They’re turning slightly red. “I parted ways with him sometime ago when I decided I need to take these,” he points to the bundle of wet documents on the side, which made San feel bad.

“Did he tell you where he’s heading at all?” San presumes the question, feeling how much more heated the movement on the ground felt. The steps are filled with aggression, but San couldn’t differ where it comes from; the ground, or Mingi beside him. 

“No,” Mingi shakes his head, waving his hand dismissively as if to calm San down. “But he’ll be okay, San. That kid has survived a lot of. . . interesting life choices. I’m sure he’d be fine. Oh, and since you’re here,” the man picks up his wet bundle into his hands, frowning from how unpleasant the texture is on his skin, “he must be trying to find Yeosang, or Yeosang is on his way to find him. Whichever finds the other fi-”

“I think I know where they are,” San concludes, pulling the knot of Mingi’s bundle so he can pull the man without touching him anywhere close to his skin. “Huh?” Mingi questions, now using the rest of the bundle as leverage for his balance, since his shoes felt slippery under him and the ground pooled with water isn’t really helping his case.

Mingi couldn’t believe San was  _ correct,  _ especially after the mountain spirit explained that he can ‘feel’ where the other two were. Mingi was half-worried he needed to jump another cliff. 

They find Yeosang and Yunho hidden near a naturally-built cave, hunched over the dim lights of a small fire. There are twigs being burnt under the fire they’ve lit, but it was too small for the newcomers to see. Yunho is heating up some type of herbs that are stored in a fabric bag, and Yeosang is mending an open sash around his wrist. 

There’s a white scythe resting beside Yeosang’s left leg, twinkling underneath the rays of sun peeking from the forest above their heads, and San noticed it as mythical. He doesn’t know why, he just does.

“What is it caused by this time?” Yeosang asks Yunho absentmindedly, and San sees Mingi flinch through the corner of his eyes. There’s a certain agitation radiating off of Yunho, and San feels it though he’s standing this far from the man. Did something happen?

“Nothing new,” Yunho grimaces as he moves his hand to apply the pre-heated herbs onto his cuts. “Nothing we could’ve avoided?” Yeosang looks up at his human friend, emotions barely hidden. 

“We’ve never managed to avoid anything, Yeosang, why do you think this time it’s anything new?” Yunho mumbles, hyper-focused on avoiding his own scars--basically not putting the medicines to use as it should be. 

Yeosang looks different. Fully divine, apparently, transformed into his full potential since San noticed how Mingi slowed his steps down to fully look at the spirit as the two of them approached Yunho and Yeosang. He has a white robe on now, a black belt hugging the center of his figure. There’s a hood connected to the robe, also coloured white and adorned with several stripes of ribbon, but the entirety of his hair turned white--along with the glowing white patterns on his forehead. There’s an entire gemstone in the middle of his forehead, where all the glowing patterns meet, and even then his face was completely painted in wrinkles of frowns.

Understandable, since he’s doing all he can to patch up Yunho’s wounds in the middle of all this. . . aggression Yunho must be radiating. Which was also understandable, considering how much the village has lost. Or, at least, San would assume.

“Yeosang, stop it!” Yunho tries shoving him away with his elbow, completely refusing to hurt his spirit friend some more. “You can’t do it alone, Yunho,” Yeosang grits his teeth, swatting Yunho’s hand away. “Yes I fucking can--we’ve both been doing things by ourselves, Yeosang! Stop hurting yourself for something I can do alone for only two minutes longer!”

“We can’t, Yunho, we can’t get time extensions!” Yeosang shouts, punching his fist against the floor as his entire eyes lit up in white faux flame. The human won’t listen, and the pair of bickering friends apparently have yet to notice the fact that Mingi and San were there at all, so when Mingi rushed over to help Yunho instead--that’s when Yeosang finally turned around to see San.

“San, tell him,” Yeosang stood up to walk over to the mountain spirit, whose hands were already reaching out to the former. Yunho is also looking at San in the moment, and San can see both of his friend’s tear-stricken eyes and although this is all too loud for him right now but he needs to help both-

“Tell him-”

_ “Yeosang!” _

It was getting harder for an overwhelmed San to process the fact that nothing collided with the surface of his fingers, not a very upset Yeosang, not an even more upset Yunho--not even a concerned Mingi. What met the surface of San’s hands were the almost gigantic splash of water from the river beside them, and the tremors of his body catching up to the scenario before his brain even does. 

The pull of a gunshot was caught by San’s ears, the movement of the bullet hitting Yeosang  _ somewhere  _ was also recorder to a detail by San’s eyes, but when he froze as Yeosang’s arm reached out to him--too far to reach and too slow to sprint towards--he’ll never forgive himself.

Yeosang fell over from the impact of getting shot, slipping on his feet onto the stream of the strong river beside them.

San wasn’t reacting for a good couple of seconds, too stunned to do anything else but crawl towards where Yeosang was at--but Mingi, blessed with a split second of superhuman power and intuition; grabbed both a weeping Yunho and a shell-shocked San, and the three of them jumps into the river to follow suit. 

When analyzed properly, it was an entirely logical plan to avoid the assailants quicker--but San wasn’t really thinking of how exposed he would be to danger if he swam faster to follow Yeosang and popped his head over water. He can feel Mingi and Yunho trying to fight the stream behind him, one of them shouting with all their might: “Don’t get shot,  _ san jeong-ryeong!”  _ since they think they’ve sinned for losing one of them for good, but San wasn’t exactly paying attention.

Yeosang wasn’t a divine-looking creature anymore. He reverted back to his normal self while the strong stream carried him around, with pale limbs and a complexion far too concerning as the physical body of a spirit. 

San swore he heard Yeosang call out to him, which only further enabled his intentional fast swimming--but he also swore he heard Yunho and Mingi bawling their eyes out for him to stop. What was it?

“San, no!” 

“San, hold on it’s a-”

_ It’s a waterfall. _

Oddly, and like a curious child who colours things out of patterns, San can basically hear the waterfall. Yeosang was like an egg atop of a tilting bull’s horns, almost tipped over the edge but not quite. And himself, he’s someplace else. In a place almost as dangerous as the round egg balancing on nothing but a small piece of surface. San thinks about how he’d be devastated if he was the cause of Yeosang’s downfall, but decided against any of those thoughts as his body speeds himself up instead of slowing himself down.

Yeosang said he usually needs the amount of healing days humans need for his scars to heal. San assumes the fact that the waterfall sounds comes from far away; that Yeosang would not survive the fall if he was to be all by himself as it happens.

Mingi, however, caught a random tree trunk which was caught in between two rocks, and though he was shaking as much as a little bunny who was dropped into an ice pond, he managed to cling his feet upon Yunho’s shoulders to stop him from falling down the stream right on time. Mingi’s bundle of documents were resting on his upper torso, which managed to stay adrift, and his fingers are both cold and in pain from how fast the stream is jabbing at them, but he stays holding on. “Yunho!” he calls out to his friend, unable to see if Yunho even pays attention to him from all the movement he’s been blocked off from seeing. “Can you see them?!”

“No!” Yunho wailed, desperate and thin-sounding, as if he'd drunk more than one serving of the river’s cold water.

And just as Yunho had said, San and Yeosang’s existence  _ were  _ too far gone to be seen.

San, who had come to a realization over how dire saving Yeosang is a few minutes ago, came in face-to-face contact with yet another rock in the middle of nowhere. It had dropped him deeper into the river, and there he stayed for a solid few seconds trying to collect his consciousness. The stream was still strong, even from under the surface of the howling river, but through the corner of his eyes, San saw the ends of Yeosang’s legs within arms reach. So he swam further, and he reached.

Not quite yet.

And he swam more, coughing up oxygen-filled bubbles under the pressure of the river. And then he reached. 

Yeosang moved out of his reach, so he tried for the last time.

His hand reached Yeosang’s hip, pulling the other spirit down to encircle his own arms around the other’s figure. The second San caught sight on where the bullet had lodged itself in Yeosang’s body, the waterfall pulls both of them down.

San might have just been delusional, but he swore he saw Yeosang’s eyes open to meet his own. It didn’t take as long as he thought it would, to reach the bottom, but when his eyes caught Yeosang’s and the world felt irrelevant aside from the urgent need to protect the being right in front of him, something in the back of San’s mind deemed the humans right. He understands them now, understood the pull and the temptation.

He understands why they found Yeosang worthy of their worship.

San would find himself wondering days and weeks after this accident, why in the nick of time, in the need to save his friends, that his mind wandered to a certain place not even their so-called god could explain about. Why the vigorous water which pushed and pulled them apart sucked him into such a deep understanding about what’s so great and grand about the hierarchy of the weak worshipping the strong, and about wanting to shield grace from the disgusting nature of how the world truly is. He’ll find out only when he learns to stop second-guessing everything, but right now, San deems himself unworthy of  _ love.  _ Of companionship, of the big and worrying concept he’s been shunned away from. 

Right now, he feels so unworthy of everyone that he does the only thing his defeated mind can do. 

San reaches out, hoping his arm was secure enough to shield a half-unconscious Yeosang from the impact of their fall against the bottom of the waterfall’s lake surface. 

And Yeosang woke up with a kick.

Someone held him down by the shoulder, saying something in a hushed whisper trying to get him back to a lying position. Yeosang felt like he’s been out for ages, only glimpses of memories over the chase in the waterfall following him like a haunting memory. Like a haunting. . . soul. He visibly cringes, the tip of his nose crunching as both the phrase and his scar pained him at the same time, and this shook him out of the place he’s been stranded at for minutes. The dark place he comes to whenever he closes his eyes and reverts to pretension since spirits don’t need sleep--a place he’s so frequently unable to shake himself out of for a few times. A dangerous place Yeosang swore against going back to, but finds himself stranded involuntarily in every time things go to shit against his will. Which was quite a lot. 

The first pair of eyes he came in contact with was San’s, who was above him. Yeosang is seeing him upside down, but the incredible amount of relief he felt surging through his body was in a good way, too much to handle. Almost as if the thought of San hurting more than he is was the teapot burning above a fiery fireplace, and he’d put a hand over that teapot and burn his skin, turn them red and wilted, but the fact that he’s fine and Yeosang can  _ see  _ that he’s fine was as relieving as being handed a refreshing bucket of cold water before getting a nice elderly lady to treat your hand with herbs Yeosang didn’t even know work on spirits’ bodies before. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s placebo. 

So maybe the comfort he tastes of seeing San and being with him throughout the week was also as believable as a placebo, but he’ll take what he could get.

“Yeosang,” the mountain spirit calls out, as if he couldn’t see Yeosang’s eyes wide open. “You’re okay,” he continues, leaning over to wipe Yeosang’s wisp of hair sticking to his forehead in a messy frayed way. Yeosang doesn’t know why San needed reassurance--probably since he saw him get shot--but despite the fact that he’s a mourning spirit, and one fact you’d find in a funeral is the high intake of reassurance since most families who were left behind could use some hope to cope; Yeosang isn’t really good at giving reassurance when he himself feels lost most of the times. 

But will he try?

Absolutely.

Though it physically hurts the mourning spirit to talk in a situation like this and his lungs felt like they’re giving up from how sore the scarring on his right shoulder is, he reaches out with his other hand to cup San’s cheek. “San?” he calls out in turn, though this time, San answers with a hum almost immediately. “I’m okay.”

The word was unsteady, his voice croaked in the middle of the way since he had to kind of shift his bodily weight to his other side, the side in which his shoulder was wounded in--but it seemed enough. Yeosang watches as the light both dimmed and brightened in San’s eyes, as if anyone can see it but him--since he sees a lot in people’s eyes--and he watches as the previous calm facade San was sporting crumbled within the palm of his hands. With only  _ one  _ of his hands.

What would become of the mountain spirit if this power Yeosang holds falls into the wrong hand, you might be thinking. Don’t worry. The hand San is tightly embracing right now as if it was his entire lifeline is just right. There could be nothing more right in the world, at least according to San at this point. 

But we’ll just see.

San is doubled over, both avoiding the possibilities of inflicting more pain on Yeosang’s shoulder and trying to give him extra warmth. At this point, San realized that his body radiates some type of temperature, especially when he curls in on himself like some days back at home where he would feel bored and some other emotions he has now acknowledged as feeling alone. Yeosang however, doesn’t radiate anything. 

He was bright and radiant when San saw him alongside Yunho--but that was probably, and he hopes that he’s wrong, because some of the villagers who were pillaged lost their lives; which meant Yeosang’s credibility as a mourning spirit was at an all-time high, even when there was no official mourning the people has done recently. Other than that, Yeosang radiates nothing. He isn’t warm, no, very much unlike the sun San is very used to. He’s something else completely, something akin to how the rivers felt when they first fell into it.

‘Cold’, was it? 

Kim Hongjoong used the word repeatedly in his memories when he was forced to feed the horses long after the sun sets and long before it rises. Yeosang’s skin radiates coldness. Maybe because mourning was an unhappy thing to go through, and coldness simply makes humans unhappy. San likes the coldness from Yeosang, though. He only wishes he could keep it around for himself for longer than. . . however long he’s going to be staying here.

“I’m tired, San,” Yeosang confesses, and the hand San was using to play with the tip of the other’s hair absentmindedly came about to rest on Yeosang’s heart. 

Yeosang recognized the concern, and hitched a laugh.

“Not like that,” he chuckles, wincing at how his shoulder moves. San dabs at the wound softly again, frowning when he gets a certain amount of blood on his ripped trousers he mended into a hygienical thing to stop Yeosang’s bleeding momentarily. “Like what then?” San questions, thinking to himself about all the wet documents Mingi carries around everywhere. They’d know how to save Yeosang, right? They’ve been in dire situations together before. 

San is looking around in search of the two men he’s grown acquainted with, hoping to somehow catch their very familiar footsteps in his radar. He gets nothing. 

“Just. . . tired,” Yeosang concludes, and San decided at that point that he felt the same way despite not having been alive for as long as Yeosang has. 

“Ah,” San confirms, still tracing shapes onto Yeosang’s foreheads. The shapes he saw the other had, when he was all mythical and divine-looking. It’s almost hard to believe this Yeosang, the ill-looking, in pain, fragile one - was the same individual with the one San saw earlier. He couldn’t pick them apart, however, since they both gave him the same. . . feeling. 

The short response invited a snort out of Yeosang, and he sits straight up without letting the mountain spirit stop him, shifts a few inches closer to where San is sitting cross-legged to rest his head on San’s lap. 

There’s a lot--apparently--of gestures Yeosang has learned within his short stay with the nomadic people, and this was one of them. San could tell, but still, he had to ask.

“What is this?” he asks, voice an entire tone beneath a whisper. Yeosang hums as an answer, calmly blinking up at the curious individual. 

“Affection,” Yeosang presumes with the delayed reply, fully closing his eyes for another long second, “there’s more of this where it came from.” San was smiling from ear to ear, checking over his shoulder from time to time in case Yunho or Mingi came along. But he heard nothing. All he heard was the satiated whir of Yeosang’s entire being, and he felt like all things were right in the world when it comes to that. But San should’ve been more careful. Should’ve looked around a bit more often, should’ve left an ear open for what comes next. 

When he heard footsteps  _ so  _ close to where they were lying, it was already too late. 

San got his hair pulled, which tipped him from his stable sitting position, and he was dragged  _ by  _ his hair from under Yeosang’s comfortable catatonic position. San was panicking, noticing the fact that Yeosang is also getting dragged away from him, but the grab on his hair was too strong. 

Was he weakened by something?

“Sir,” the voice from a man whose hand is still tightly secured around his hair comes ringing out above him, and San is too busy struggling away from his grasp to care. “These two aren’t dead, Sir, but they’re not the men we are looking for.”

“They’re not?” someone’s voice chimes in, their tongue clicking disappointedly. “Throw them away then. The little one looks like he’s dying, anyways.”

This provided San enough time to pull his captor by the arm with enough force to  _ maybe  _ dislocate his joints, and as the man kneels down on one knee, he bites the man’s arm as hard as he could, leaving the man in a shrieking, crying mess. Only after San was released did he realize something was familiar about these men. The uniforms reminded him of the ‘soldiers’ who kept him captive. Before their Commander shot him. Weren’t they?

An amused laugh comes from someone on top of a pitiful, sad horse. The man looks powerful, safe for the ridiculous moustaches San has been seeing from a lot of them. Was it a sign of power? 

“Dying, you said? I think this biting one has enough spunk to last us decades,” the laughing man commented, flicking a little stick he’s held in his hands, the one producing smoke. A fat chunk of burnt ashes tainted the ground below them, and San cringed from the smell. “Sir, but this one is bleeding. Should we take him back too? Maybe after he’s mended to health the two of them would be of use for-”

San notices the man, talking about Yeosang while holding him up by the back of his neck, shaking him as if he’s worth less than a baby cat crying for help on the side of a dingy road. There were two other men blocking his way from Yeosang and the  _ soldier  _ holding him up, but San bulldozed his way through to once again pack a punch strong enough to rattle the soldier’s teeth for days. Which, San notices at the back of his mind, isn’t as strong as he wanted it to be.

He caught Yeosang’s limping body before he could fall onto his knees in front of these particular set of humans--ones which he didn’t get any good feelings with, and tried reasoning with the environment around him after hiding Yeosang behind him. Sadly, confronted by a large deal of water behind them, the ground beneath it won’t really budge. San could barely even reach it--and he’s never had such a good relationship with the bodies of water. 

“Shit,” the laughing man with the smoke stick huffs, checking a round ticking metal thing hanging around his waist.  _ Tick tock,  _ it sounds, and San is getting agitated. “This one’s like a wild beast.”

“Fine,” he continues speaking, cocking a gun in place, one with almost the same length San was shot with. Only longer. The mountain spirit notices what it is, cringing actively when he feels Yeosang’s fingers pull at his sleeves, trying his best to get San to move away. Of course Yeosang would remember San has been shot before. Out of everything he could leave a lasting memory on, he chose a gunshot. “This could reach your friend back there,” the man continues, a crooked smile decorating his face, though it doesn’t make San feel good, unlike Mingi’s. 

San stood his ground. 

“If you refuse to come with us, Mister  _ I-bite-everyone-I-see,  _ your friend there is gonna go meet God a lot sooner. But if you voluntarily come here,” the man points to his side, where another man is slowly getting a stance on, “you’d be doing something good for your country, and who knows?! If you survive, you’d be able to see your dying friend again!”

The man ends his speech, nudging his partners with a coy smile on, whispering among themselves: “Do you think they got that? These fuckers seem a little uneducated.”

But San understands.

The whole premise was he has to give up, or else they’d shoot. He could do the same thing he did around the camp and just recently, like the cliff, but Yeosang is wounded, so he’d probably not be able to stand around long enough until San takes him and they can run--but also: Mingi stopped him from doing so. He hadn’t asked why, but something about Mingi’s posture told him that messing up their environment that much is unheard of. Fair. It’s not like San owns every highland he’s going to go to.

He’d take it again if  _ he  _ were the one threatened of being shot. He would, with open arms. There’s a fifty percent chance that he can heal again, and if he doesn’t--only Washi and Moro are sentient enough to miss his absence. He’d be reborn again one day, as another spirit--according to Mingi and Yunho’s books--and his life continues in this cycle of nonsensical road of life. But Yeosang. 

The mourning spirit is someone who was conjured after an emotional prayer to the gods, and there’s no way of telling if Yeosang’s life-cycle is as stable and promising as San’s is, who has a domain large enough to pull him back home. There’s also the fact that Yeosang’s death would be devastating to Yunho, who is still  _ maybe  _ hoping that Yeosang’s existence could bring back their old friend Wooyoung--who is a whole mystery in and of itself. Yeosang has so many to live for, still, and he has. . . none. 

Yeosang lives around humans who live to worship him and actively look for him, and he’s got more than enough on his plate to take care of for him to die right  _ now.  _ Without closure, without a goodbye. If his heart was broken from how abruptly Wooyoung left him, Yeosang wouldn’t want to leave the ones he loves the same way Wooyoung did. Would he?

“I’ll go,” San gave in.

The man lowers his gun, clapping excitedly as if San gifted him a bucket of apple. Paralleling the man’s excitement, Yeosang is behind him holding onto San’s arms for dear life. There’s a tinge of iron in the air, and that’s when San realized Yeosang was holding onto him hard enough his wound was re-opening. 

“Yeosang-”

“San,  _ no,”  _ Yeosang pulls him closer to the lake behind them, but San stops both of their movements and would not budge. The ‘no’ sounded so convicted, like he had a lot of things he wanted to say, yet he couldn’t really. There was also the way Yeosang’s eyes are glimmering in tears as he looks up at San, and their furrowed look meets each other’s. “I  _ have  _ to, Yeosang,” San detached Yeosang’s nimble fingers from their grip around his arms. Yeosang latched onto both of his palms immediately, tremors passing between both of their existence, back and forth. 

“You’d really. . . leave him alone, right?” San questions the man on their horses, who were at least decent enough to let them exchange goodbyes. “Of course,” one of them mumbles around their stick of smoke and death, “are you seeing him? This kid’s too fragile. He’d die before we even get there.”

San’s eyes turned round in shock, forgetting that the man was saying that expecting both of them to be weak, unfed humans. He doesn’t  _ want  _ Yeosang to die, or even take part in a few percentages of why he’s going to. 

“Hear that, Yeosang? You can’t die,” San lets go of their conjoined fingers, moving Yeosang as light as he can to a sitting position. “Stay- stay here, okay? Yunho and Mingi would find you, won’t they?”

“San, I’m not going to die,” Yeosang whispers out of gritted teeth, the sheen on his eyes from the growing tears spilling out inconsistently as he rapidly blinks, as if he doesn’t want the tears to fog up his sight of San. “You  _ aren’t,  _ that’s why,” San maintains the eye-contact a heartbeat longer, ignoring how painful of a sting he’s feeling from Yeosang as of right now. He’s so very upset. 

“I can’t watch you die, Yeosang.”

“And you’re going to make  _ me  _ watch as you walk away from me to die?” Yeosang snaps in retaliation faster than previously, as if he’s prepared this before, as if he was thinking of saying this exact few words over and over again. San has nothing to say to that. “If you were to die in front of me, San,” Yeosang sobs, the last few words hitched in the back of his throat,  _ “at least we’d go together.” _

San is actively shaking, not realizing there are tears coming out of the corners of his eyes as well. Yeosang’s hands are at the back of his head, and his hands are still hanging in the middle of both of them, confused, tempted. It sounds beautiful. The offer sounded beautiful. 

To reach the world’s end with someone is one thing, yet to see that one person as your heart resides in the cold and catatonic position it was birthed with must be another thing. But reaching the world’s end means nothing when  _ your  _ world ends. San knows that much, from his conflicted feelings as he watched his memories in playback. 

It’d be even more beautiful if they were not this complicated. It’d be even more beautiful if they weren’t different. Even then there was never any proof for San to be entirely sure, yet since there weren’t any concrete answers he could base this off on, he needs to save the one who has a lot to live for. To take Yeosang with him and watch him die would be selfish. To take Yeosang with him and run away with a higher chance of death would be tumultuous. To take Yeosang with him and meet their end in whatever these creatures have in store for them would be the least violent outcome possible, but to take Yeosang with him at all would be foolish. 

Yeosang wasn’t made for him the same way San wasn’t made for all this mess he’s been getting himself into. If only he was, if only the mourning spirit was someone conjured for  _ San,  _ he’d think twice about this decision. Not only twice, he’d think a couple of times. He’d spend a whole day just weighing the options.

But Yeosang; this teary-eyed, shaking Yeosang in front of him, was not his. He wanted him to be, wanted so  _ very  _ much, and he’s so very upset of having to leave him behind, but. . .

The sun is setting as San heaves a heavy sigh.

“Would you do me a favour, Yeosang?” - the question was short, straight to the point, but it tanked Yeosang’s short-lived expectations. The delivery of which San spoke these words in were heavy, too heavy for Yeosang to accept, and way too unstable for him to further question. With more tears running down his eyes and the hope and dreams of a lifetime slipping out of his hands like a destroyed kite, Yeosang smiles bitterly. “Anything, San.”

“Stay.”

Everytime Yeosang blinks, though it was the least he could manage to decrease to since he’d want to savour the last few times he’d be allowed to see his San; tears dribbled out of the corners of his eyes.

“Stay until you feel better, and find Mingi and Yunho.”

There’s little to no reason Yeosang could refuse anymore, since there was no point. There wasn’t, and he knows that as much as San does. Still, he raises his unarmed hand to reach San one last time only to realize he’s out of reach.

“Maybe,” San mirrored his smile, “in another life, I’d get to come back to you then.”

_ And I’ll get to keep you then. _

They dragged San away, Yeosang allowed to do nothing but sit there and watch as San’s entire being tried to fight the pain of human’s skin on his bare ones. They’d put San in a muffler, one of them mumbling an offhanded insult about how he’ll just go on to bite people in the hand once they reach their destination. It sparked hope in Yeosang again, hope that they’re not leading San straight to his death like they have done to most. But what then?

Yeosang sagged against the tree behind him, keeping the eye-contact San is still holding up though he was pulled by the neck, a chain connecting him to one of the horse’s saddles. 

What then?

“Don’t worry, son, he’ll rest in peace soon enough,” one of the soldiers said to San, who still refuses to look away from where Yeosang is sitting at. “He’s a goner.”

And San--guilty, anguish-ridden San--grew to believe it.

Yeosang however, leaning against a tree with so much desperation he could crush an entire city; watches in silence as he wasn’t allowed to do anything once again as he watches yet another soul he’d silently sworn his life to walk away with an empty promise Yeosang knows only a victorious hero could keep.

And Yeosang hasn’t exactly met heroes in his lifetime. Only souls who keep walking away from him once he gets too attached. 

. . .

  
  


Fortunately for him, Mingi and Yunho were around the entire time--waiting for the right moment and debating on whether or not they should leap in and save the mountain spirit. Seeing how dejected he was and how many men were surrounding them, however, Yunho was glad that San could at least come to terms with the soldiers to make sure Yeosang was okay--to the lowest standards possible--and both him and Mingi came out of hiding only after the unit of soldiers were out of sight. 

Yeosang cried again when his ears caught the sound of their movement and his eyes met theirs, holding his wounded shoulder as he doubled over in quiet sobs. They don’t know how to comfort him, so they did the least they can do.

Waiting.

Yunho, however, is looking at the path San left in with determination in his eyes. 

**Author's Note:**

> * the second character to the name Yeo-sang is the 상 (sang), and in some context or translations means either phase or mourning, so I decided to use it as a play-on word to what he is, hence: "the mourning spirit".  
> * the ending won't be plot-satisfying, be warned, since I wanted to focus more on personality and character building. i apologize~~~~  
> * please. . . bully me to continue this. i need. . . strength.


End file.
